11 



now been fully published and are already well known. The work 

 was begun by Mr. A. Malins Smith, Mr. J. E. Matthews, and Miss 

 Doris L. Mackinnon, who passed through a course of training 

 with me in London in the early part of 1916, under the scheme 

 arranged by the Medical Research Committee and the Eoyal 

 Society for the "War Office. On going to Liverpool these workers 

 were joined by Mr. H. F. Garter, and received the assistance of 

 Professor "Warrington Yorke. Later Mr. Malins Smith and Mr. 

 Matthews continued the work alone, and it is to their efforts that 

 most of our present knowledge is due. 



I shall consider this important work, carried out in Liverpool, 

 in grea^^er detail in later chapters, and will here merely note 

 briefly the general results. In a first report (Yorke, Carter, 

 Mackinnon, Matthews, and Malins Smith, 1917), results were 

 recorded of examinations of the stools of 344 persons who had 

 never left G-reat Britain. Of these, 138 were ' patients, for the 

 most part surgical, in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary ; they con- 

 sisted of both males and females of various ages ' : the rest (206) 

 ' were healthy young men of about 18 years of age who had 

 recently entered the army and were in training at a camp in the 

 vicinity of Liverpool '. No less than 10 of these (2 in the first 

 group, 8 in the second) were found to be infected with E. histo- 

 lytica — a percentage, for the whole, of 2-9, or roughly 3. This 

 figure was obtained, moreover, as a result of making only a single 

 examination of the stools of each case, so that it certainly repre- 

 sents less than the number actually infected. None of these 10 

 infected individuals had ever suffered from dysentery. The cysts 

 in their stools were typical in every way ; and further evidence 

 that they were really those of K histolytica was obtained by 

 animal experiment — a kitten fed upon cysts from one case 

 developing typical and fatal amoebic dysentery; 



Further results were announced in the following year in a 

 Report to the Medical Research Committee (Carter, Matthews, 

 Mackinnon, and Smith, 1918), and at a meeting of the Society 

 of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (Yorke, 1918) ; and again in 

 1919, at a meeting of the British Medical Association (Yorke, 

 1919). Since then Mr. Malins Smith and Mr. Matthews have 

 published a complete account of all their findings (Matthews 

 and Smith, 1919, 1919 a). The five reports published by them 

 summarize the results obtained in the examination of British 

 residents — never abroad — belonging to the following classes : 

 (1) Civilians in an infirmary, (2) Army recruits, (3) Children, 

 (4) Asylum patients, (5) University and school cadets. Infections 

 with jE. histolytica, ranging from 1-5 per cent, (infirmary patients) 

 to 9-7 per cent, (asylum patients), were found in all these series- 

 Other protozoa were, of course, also found and recorded, but will 

 be considered later in the analysis of the total findings from all 

 sources. 



Investigations along somewhat different lines were made 

 during 1917 by Dr. P. P. Laidlaw at Guy's Hospital. He searched 

 for K histolytica in patients with symptoms suggestive of infection 



