HOSPITAL HEROES CONVICT THE "COOTIE 



IT WOULD be highly appropriate if 

 the United States Government were 

 to confer a special decoration upon 

 sixty-six young American soldiers who 

 have displayed unspectacular, but unsur- 

 passed, courage in France, a courage that 

 dared wasting illness, in a hospital sub- 

 ject to the bombardment of Hun shells, 

 in order that future millions who are to 

 make their way from our shores to the 

 battle front may be spared the suffering 

 and the disabilities of trench fever. 



The courage which these sixty-six boys 

 have evinced differs greatly from that in- 

 duced by the battle call which sends men 

 shouting "over the top." In volunteering 

 to undergo tests which have identified 

 trench fever as a germ disease they knew 

 what they were facing — months, perhaps 

 a year, of illness, of voluntary imprison- 

 ment in a hospital ward, of removal from 

 all the activities and the excitement of 

 the soldier's life in a foreign land, and 

 from the companionship of comrades in 

 arms. They were, necessarily, men in 

 perfect health, many of them wholly unac- 

 customed to, and therefore dreading, the 

 strangenessof hospital wards, of surgeons, 

 of medicines, of blood injections, etc. 



'THE INOCULATION TESTS 



The knowledge which these heroic 

 sixty-six, by offering up their virile bod- 

 ies to a disease test, have enabled science 

 to acquire may prove the determining 

 factor in the world war, for it may mean 

 the conquest of trench fever, just as the 

 sacrifices of a smaller group of men 18 

 years ago enabled Walter Reed and his 

 associates to identify the mosquito as the 

 insect which carries yellow fever. Once 

 the source of the contagion was discov- 

 ered the fight against yellow fever was 

 more than half won. 



The experiments conducted on Amer- 

 ica's Sixty-six have fastened the guilt of 

 contagion-bearing upon the body louse, 

 the "cootie," of which Mr. Corey writes 

 in the preceding pages. 



The first question studied was whether 

 this was a germ disease. No germs could 

 be seen with the microscope, but the U. S. 

 Medical Department knew that there are 

 numerous germs which cannot be seen by 

 even the most powerful magnification. 



Therefore this point had to be established 



by taking blood from men with the fever 

 and injecting it into healthy men. ( Hit of 

 34 such individuals inoculated with blood, 

 or some constituent thereof, taken from 

 seven cases of trench fever, 23 volunteers 

 developed the disease. Out of [6 healthy 

 men inoculated with whole blood from a 

 trench-fever case, 15 developed the dis- 

 ease. These experiments proved that 

 trench fever is a germ disease, and that 

 the germs live in the blood of men so in- 

 fected. 



LEARNING HOW THE DISEASE IS SPREAD 



The next question was, "How is this 

 disease spread?" Naturally, the body 

 louse was to be considered first. Targe 

 numbers of these were collected from 

 patients with trench fever, and also some 

 of the same kind were brought from Eng- 

 land, having been collected from healthy 

 men. The lice from trench-fever cases 

 were allowed to bite 22 men. Twelve of 

 these later developed the disease, while 

 four men bitten by lice from healthy men 

 remained free from the disease. Eight 

 other volunteers, living under exactly the 

 same conditions, in the same wards, but 

 kept free from lice, did not develop 

 trench fever. After blood inoculation the 

 disease developed in from 5 to 20 days. 

 After being bitten by infected lice the 

 fever required from 15 to 35 days to de- 

 velop. 



With such data in their possession, the 

 medical departments of the Allies have 

 taken up the problem of the "cootie" in 

 its bearing upon the supreme question of 

 winning the war. Until recently the odious 

 vermin have been considered only in the 

 light of bodily annoyances to the troops, 

 in some cases having a certain effect on 

 their morale. Now, however, the battle 

 is on in earnest to rid the men of the 

 disease-bearers, for when a man falls a 

 victim to trench fever he is, in the aver- 

 age case, unfit as a fighter for six months. 



It is a simple problem in multiplica- 

 tion to appreciate how tremendously 

 America's Sixty-six may have contrib- 

 uted to the power of our blows against 

 the Huns by giving science the informa- 

 tion which will result in keeping our sol- 

 diers fit for service. 



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