A MARTYR TO SCIENCE.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 212, 12 February 1875, Page 3

A MARTYR TO SCIENCE.

Science has had a fresh martyr, says the Pall Mall Gazette, of no mean type in Dr Laval, a surgeon-major in the French army, who literally laid down his life in the attempt to grapple with the late visitation of plague in Tunis, and track it to its source. At the time of the outbreak in the province of Bingazi (according to an interesting memoir contributed to the Gazette Jtledicale d' Orient by Dr Marroin), Surgeon-Major Laval had left Constantine, his station in Algeria, on leave obtained for the purpose of conducting botanical researches in Tunis, But having once resolved to study the origin and progress of the epidemic —the news of which reached him suddenly while thus engaged—he never relaxed the self-imposed task, and, though he fell a victim to his generous enthusiasm, he has left such a monument as probably would have best pleased himself in a complete set of notes and a diary, showing that he had perfectly mastered all the facts within his reach. As in a simultaneous invasion of the same dreaded enemy on the Persian borders, the plague had been preceded in the province of Tunis it visited by a local famine, which reduced the Bedouin population to the greatest privations. When Dr Laval, moved to bis new enterprise, arrived on the 7th of June at Merdsch, reported as the first focus of the malady, he found that the three nearest tribes had lived for months on wild vegetables, with a very scanty supply of barleymeal. and, in fact, had been all but starved. While in this condition of suffering a boy had been seized in one of their encampments in April with an illness which carried him off on the fifth day, and was beyond doubt genuine plague. His father was the next victim ; and so it spread on through the tribe, who assured Dr Laval they had had no previous communication with any other. It must have passed from them, undoubtedly, to the village of Merdsch itself, which lay not quite a mile off. There had been no deaths for several months in this place until the Ist of June, when the first case of plague in it proved fatal, and was followed by a number of others with alarming rapidity. When Dr Laval arrived on the 7th there were fifteen patients to be treated out of a population of not over 200 persons. The symptoms were invariably the same, and the typical boils present in all cases, whether of death or recovery. For a fortnight the French surgeon struggled on manfully with his work ; attended all the sick, and employed all such disinfecting precautions as he found possible. But on the 21st he succumbed to an attack, and on the 27th was dead ; though not without leaving behind him records the most complete ever hitherto obtained of a number of cases properly observed, and thus sufficiently giving proof of his own patient heroism. It may be added that the theory that the plague is in its origin simply a very bad form of typhus, usually following famine, and aggravated by want of sanitary precautions, may be said to have gained strong additional corroboration from the results of Dr Laval's self-sacrifice.