12 The Philippine Journal of Science 1920 
at Rome if his army had not "been decimated by malarial fever. 
In the year 208 A. D. the Roman Army in Scotland lost 50,000 
out of a total of 80,000 from malarial fever. The expedition in 
1740 of English and American Provincial troops against Car- 
thagena failed because of the prevalence of yellow fever in the 
expeditionary force. Benedict Arnold would undoubtedly have 
surprised and captured Quebec, Canada, in 1775 but for the oc- 
currence of smallpox in his command during the march through 
Maine, and thus would have added Canada to the present United 
States. In 1898, during and after the operations of the Fifth 
Army Corps against Santiago de Cuba, half of our forces in 
Cuba were incapacitated for duty by malarial fever. 
These are but a few of the many instances that could be quoted 
to “point a moral or adorn a tale,” not to mention the 70,000 
crises of typhoid fever in the Prussian Campaign in the Franco- 
Prussian War of 1870, the 50,000 cases in the English Army 
in the War in South Africa, and the 20,000 cases that occurred 
in the United States Army in the Spanish- American War in 
1898. It is such experiences as these that have forced the mili- 
tary surgeon to develop along the lines indicated. It may be 
stated that the diseases that have caused the greatest ravages 
in modern armies are malarial fever, typhoid fever, yellow fever, 
and venereal diseases. The plasmodium of malaria was dis- 
covered in the red blood corpuscles of malarial patients by 
Alphonse Laveran, a surgeon in the French Army in Algiers in 
1880. Ronald Ross, a surgeon in the English army in India, 
demonstrated the infection of birds by the bite of the mosquito 
in 1897-98. The fact that the anopheles mosquito only infected 
human beings with malaria was demonstrated by Grassi and 
A. Bignomi in 1899. Charles F. Craig, a military surgeon in 
the United States Army, demonstrated the possibility of ma- 
larial carriers in 1907. Knowing the etiology of malarial fever 
and its transmission by the anopheles mosquito, the principles 
involved are simple, namely: keep the men protected from mos- 
quitoes, destroy mosquitoes, and treat carriers so they will cease 
being carriers and infecting more mosquitoes. From 6,000,000 
to 7,000,000 cases of malaria occur annually in the United States. 
In the military camps only 220 cases were reported among the 
4,000,000 men called out. 
With regard to typhoid fever, the first work along the present 
lines among English-speaking people was done by Sir Almworth 
Wright, a surgeon in the British Army, and in South Africa 
during the Boer war. The results were, for several reasons, 
