i26  The  Laboratory  in  War  Time.  {A?'J™iyV\l\T 
modities,  their  profits,  their  capital,  their  incomes,  their  all.  To  the 
credit  of  these  manufacturers  let  it  be  said  that  they  have  met  these 
burdens  most  responsively. 
Added  to  these  complications  have  been  enlistments  and  the  draft 
making  inroads  on  the  laboratory  staff  and  on  the  manufacturer's 
employees. 
In  the  particular  line  in  which  I  am  interested  the  war  has 
developed  some  era-making  events.  At  the  beginning  of  the  war 
surgeons  found  themselves  in  strange  surgical  lands,  witnessing  un- 
usual sights.  It  was  necessary  to  cast  aside  previous  experience 
and  begin  to  learn  anew.  As  a  consequence  surgical  developments 
have  revolutionized  methods  of  treating  infected  wounds. 
The  mere  magnitude  of  the  campaigns,  the  conditions  under 
which  battles  have  been  fought,  the  nature  of  the  weapons  employed, 
the  unusual  type  of  injuries,  the  great  difference  in  the  conditions 
under  which  medical  and  surgical  treatment  must  be  applied  have 
given  the  practice  in  this  war  an  entirely  different  face  and  it  may 
be  stated  that  the  medical  staff  of  all  the  armies  of  the  world  have 
met  the  situation. 
This  revolution  of  medical  and  surgical  methods  has  called  for 
many  new  appliances  and  preparations,  or  at  least  modification  of 
the  older  forms.  A  goodly  number  of  antiseptics  and  antiseptic 
preparations  are  among  the  products  of  this  revolution.  In  fact, 
antiseptic  treatment,  or  rather  the  prevention  of  sepsis  by  antiseptics, 
has  received  the  greatest  attention.  A  typical  example  of  this  is  the 
well-discussed  method  of  Dr.  Alexis  Carrel,  who  has  evolved  a 
method  of  treatment  of  infected  wounds  which  bears  his  name.  It 
has  been  stated  by  an  English  authority  that  the  whole  process  of  war 
surgery  has  been  vastly  improved  by  Dr.  Carrel's  researches. 
The  Carrel  Method  in  its  simplest  form  is  a  method  of  sterilizing 
wounds;  a  method  in  which  an  antiseptic  solution  is  used.  The 
solution,  known  as  the  Carrel-Dakin  Solution,  has  been  the  subject 
of -most  extended  discussion  in  medical  and  pharmaceutical  journals. 
As  worked  out  by  Carrel  and  Dakin  it  is  a  specially  made  solution 
of  hypochlorite.  It  has  been  the  subject  of  a  vast  amount  of  mis- 
information in  the  journals  and,  as  a  consequence,  many  attempts 
to  prepare  it  by  following  misleading  formulas,  and  by  those  not 
skilled  in  the  art  of  preparing  such  a  preparation,  have  resulted  in 
much  confusion  and  at  times  disastrously.  Indeed  mixtures  have 
been  supplied  under  the  name  which  are  positively  dangerous,  and 
