MEDICAL SCIENCE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 17 November 1927, Page 9

MEDICAL SCIENCE

A DOCTOR’S SACRIFICE DEATH OF DR. A. STOKES. “The death of Dr. Adrian Stokes at the early age of forty robs the Empire of one of the most brilliant students of medicine of this generation, and of a man with many wonderful and lovable qualities,” states the “British Medical Journal.” Alluding to his work during the Great War. the article states: “In 1915 an outbreak of enteric fever amongst the civil population of Belgian Flanders aroused anxiety and Stokes was de tailed to cope with it. It was mainly due to the hygienic measures he took that the disease never spread to the targe number of British troops billeted in the infected avea. For his services in this connection ho was appointed Chevalier de I’Ordre de la Couronne. bv the King of the Belgians. By discovering ths carrier, he wa s also the means of arresting a typhoid epidemic in th» Guards Brrtadc in 1915. “In the spring of 1910 an epidemic of jaundice broke oui among the British and French troops in France and Flanders. Ftokcs was prominent, mnong the small group o f British officers whose investigations proved that the disease was caused bv infection of the liver and kidneys with spirochaete He found the spirochnote in rats caught in trenches In which the disease had occurred and by showing that the infection was spread bv the presence of their urine in badly drained trenches he was able to indicate how the epidemic could be stamped out. He proved that the jaundice was caused by the inflammatory changes in the liver, which produced obstruction of th„ smallest bile ducts. Stokes did much to improve the methods of preventing and treating the severe forms uf wound infection, and wax the first in France to isolate the organisms of ga s gangrene in the blood stream. “Tn 1919 he returned to Trinity College, Dublin as Professor of Bacteriology and Preventive Medicine

and Pathologist to the Royal Citv ‘ f Dublin and Adelaide Hospitals. Tn 1922 lie was appointed Sir William Dunn Professor of Pathology in London University at Guv’s Hospital. CONTRACTED YELLOW FEVER. “In the spring 0 T 1927 the Rockefeller Commission on yellow fever in West Africa sought Stokes’s assistance. . . It has long been known that yellow fever, ns it occurs in South America, ig propagated by the common domestic mosquito, stegomyia fascia.ta, and recently Noguehi described a leptospira which he believed was the cause of the disease. As the epidemiology o’f the yellow fever of West Africa is very different from that of South America, doubts have been raised whether the disease in the two continents was really the same. It wns therefore necessary to discover whether the clinical and pathological characters of the West African disease were identical with the better known Smith American disease, and whether the fever was, like the latter, transmitted bv mosquitoes.

“From the meagre details avail, able, it seems probable that Stokes contracted yellow fever from the bite of an experimentally infected mosquito. _ H- became suddenly ill on 15tb September, and war, removed to the European hospital on >h<. following mqrning. died on the evening of the 19th. He was buried next day nt the Ikngi Cemetery after a service conducted at the colonial church by the Bishop of Lagos.”