Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 72, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1919 — Conquest of Typhoid Is Compared by Physicians With Tetanus Victory [ARTICLE]

Conquest of Typhoid Is Compared by Physicians With Tetanus Victory

WonderfulachTevement’lnmedicine comparable with the victory over tetanus Is the conquest of typhoid fever. Typhoid fever has been one of the historic pestilences of armies. The discovery In 1880 of the germ which caused It was one of the very earliest achievements of the bacteriologists. Yet even in 1898, writes Maj. W. W. Keen in Yale Review, when I published a book on the “Surgical Complications and Sequels of Typhoid Fever,” so little was positively known about It that I had to assemble proofs that the typhoid bacillus could reach the blood stream, that it could cause abscesses in bones and muscles, could cause gangrene of the tissues and even of whole limbs, Infections of the gall bladder, and many other surgical disorders. In that same year in the war with Spain we learned a fearful lesson of what it could do. Every fifth man in our army of 107,000 was attacked with typhoid. It .caused over 86 per cent of all the deaths in that war. Had the same ratio held in the British army of over 5,000,000 in the world war there would have been more than 1,000,000 cases of typhoid. Instead of that, down to November, 1916, there had been only 4,571 cases! In our own army on the Mexican border in 1916, among 20,000 troops only one man fell ill with typhoid, although it was prevalent in near-by towns. In our present army, from September 2, 1917, to January 25, 1918, with a daily average of 742,625 men assembled from all over the country, often from places where autumnal typhoid was taking its annual toll of lives, only 119 cases of typhoid occurred. Had the 1898 rate prevailed there would have been 144,568 cases. As soon as all these recruits were protected by vaccination, the case rate fell so rapidly that in the 17 weeks from December 7, 1917, to April 5, 1918—a period longer than our war with Spain—there wSre only ten cases among probably nearly 1,000,000 men.