Proceedings of Eighth Annual Meeting 157 



the lack of initiative on the part of the local boards of health to use 

 the power that is in the law, that is all. 



President Rider : I see Dr. Hunt has returned to us. He has a 

 report to make, I think, before we adjourn. 



Dr. Hunt : I want to discuss this problem a little bit, but I will 

 just make a report. I went over as the society wished me to and 

 spoke to the women, heard a most delightful talk by Senator Edge, 

 a good broad-headed talk on current questions, both domestic and 

 foreign, a good level-headed talk, and I am very glad I was over 

 there. My talk, I talked about four or five minutes, and I had to 

 fire it sharp and quick at them. I don't know whether I got it across 

 or not. But Mr. Jackson says, "I think so, I guess it is all right." 

 I didn't like the task and I didn't thank the society for sending me 

 over. I didn't like the job. 



This problem here is a very interesting problem to me, and per- 

 sonally I do not feel that we have any right to predicate the cam- 

 paign against the Anopheles mosquito in malaria without there being 

 some criterion or diagnosis to go by. I have been a practitioner of 

 medicine for thirty years and I have made a special study of this 

 particular disease and I have fought them tooth and nail as far as 

 I could. I do not believe I have had six cases in twenty years prac- 

 tice in a population of 120,000 people, without plasmodium in the 

 blood. We know this matter in Sussex County, we know all about 

 Franklin Furnace and all that sort of thing, and the Princeton epi- 

 demic. Those cases were proven up. But unless the board of 

 health has some criterion of the presence of plasmodium in the 

 blood, I do not believe those are worth basing an active campaign 

 against the Anopheles mosquito. 



One idea that you are going to eradicate in your care of the dis- 

 ease, probably twenty per cent, of those cases of death are tuber- 

 culosis, another twenty per cent, are sepsis of one kind or another, 

 and so it goes on. The diagnosis of malaria used to be the diagnosis 

 of typhoid fever. I just illustrate one point. In the Spanish-Amer- 

 ican War the best medical men we had on the field in Cuba and 

 Porto Rico were diagnosing cases of typhoid fever as malaria. That 

 occurred in over 5,000 cases. They were typhoid fever, they were 

 not malaria. I remember as a boy — not as a boy, a young man in 

 1894, when I was an interne in the Maine general hospital in Port- 

 land, Maine, we had some men come up there from the tropics, the 

 Spanish-American War. They came in there with disease. I 

 remember the report of the pathologist. He said he found in the 



