MAP-CHANGING MEDICINE 



321 



Photograph by Sumner W. Matteson 



AZTEC RUINS NEAR MITEA, MEXICO 



Mexico entered into the yellow-fever campaign last year and Brazil inaugurated vigorous 

 warfare on the few remaining sources of infection in that country. These were the last 

 lands where the disease existed. The ruins at Mitla are believed to be mute witnesses to 

 civilizations conquered by the yellow-fever germ (see text, pages 326-327). 



helps the situation. It opens up all the 

 water area to the passage of the fish and 

 the latter make the most of their oppor- 

 tunity. 



IT COSTS ONLY ONE-EOURTH AS MUCH TO 

 GET RID OF MAEARIA AS TO KEEP IT 



In six Arkansas towns where malaria 

 control has continued for four years, it 

 has been found that the cost of the disease 

 to the community is four times as great 

 as the cost of banishing it. 



In Hamburg, Arkansas, the number of 

 visits paid by. doctors to malarial patients 

 fell from 2,312 in 1916 to 59 in 1918 and 

 to practically nothing- in 1921. 



It has been well known that the ma- 

 larial parasite cannot live in the presence 

 of quinine in the blood. Experiments on 

 a large scale in Mississippi have demon- 

 strated that ten grains of that drug a day 

 for eight weeks kill the parasites in 90 

 per cent of the cases treated. 



Under these large-scale demonstrations 



the world has had the way pointed out 

 through which it may rid itself of one of 

 humanity's greatest foes — an enemy 

 which, unmastered, annually slays more 

 victims than even the World War claimed 

 in any twelve months. 



In the world-wide crusade for the con- 

 quest of contagion inaugurated after the 

 close of the World War, yellow fever 

 stood out as an insolent foe that had been 

 defeated in organized warfare, but that 

 had now resorted to sniping and bush- 

 whacking in tropical America and Africa. 



How finally to drive it beyond the 

 bounds of civilization and into the land of 

 extinction became the thought of one of 

 the world's leading sanitary organizations. 



General William C. Gorgas, who had 

 been the Xemesis of the Yellow Jack at 

 Havana and Panama, was induced to head 

 a board whose mission was to run down 

 that disease to its lair and to stamp it out 

 forever. It was while General Gorgas 

 was en route to Africa, to extirpate the 



