WAR AND DISEASE

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1711, 12 May 1917, Page 4

WAR AND DISEASE

In an article on the work of doctors in war Dr. Woods Hutchinson, the well-known American scientist, points to the enormous advance made, by the medical profession in preventing and treating disease iiv war time. He says; —“It is an overwhelming proven fact that up to about 30 years the real terror of war was disease, and that sickness from camp infections and bad food diseases destroyed from live to seven times as many lives in army itself as were ever lost on the field of hat tie or as a result of wounds. Up to 30 years ago the deadliest enemy of the soldier in the field was not bullets, but bacilli; not the sword, but the streptococcus. The Thirty Years’ War is es - timated to have reduced the population of Western and Central Europe from about 30,000,000 to under 1-1,000,000, and yet during the whole of its deadly course less than 30 pitched battles were fought, and the actual number of men killed in them or dying of their wounds afterwards was under 200,000. Pestilence, disease, and famine accounted for (he rest. Even under the most favourable conditions, up to 30 years ago the regular ratio between deaths from disease in war and deaths on the tick! of buttle and from wounds was seven to one. For instance, the death-rate in the American Civil War was six times as great among soldiers actually killed in the held from disease as from battle and wounds.’’

NEW MEDICAL METHODS,

Bather mure than 40 years ago, says Dr. Woods Hutchinson, the new doctor began to take the iield, and his iirst distinct triumph was in (he .Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the death-rate was reduced to three deaths from disease to one from battle. The Kusso-.iapauese war carried it one step further, and reduced the ratio to about 21 deaths from disease to one in battle; but the Spanish-American war, regrettable to admit, slumped badly, and the deaths from one disease alone —typhoid fever—were live times as many as the deaths in batlle and from wounds • in the Cuban campaign. This was largely due to inlection borne by Hies. Hut the present war, huge and destructive as it is, has utterly shattered all previous records, and the British Jtoya-1 Army Medical Corps upon the western front, under the leadership of Sir Alfred Keogh, has actually, from such data as is available,more than reversed the ratio; that is to say, only one deatli from disease to three upon the Held of battle. The doctor can influence the deathrate in war in the super!) advances and revolutionary improvements effected in the treatment of wounds. Barely 50 years ago it was no uncommon thing tor 20, 40, and even 00 per cent, of the wounded to die in hospital or camp as a result of wound infections. The death-rate, for instance, in some military hospitals as lately as the Civil War, when the dreaded hospital gangrene got into the wards was over 40 per cent., almost, regardless of the size or seriousness of the wounds. By the new science of bacteriology this danger has been almost wiped out, each improvement in methods cutting down the death-rate tower and lower, until in the present war upon the western front tactually 05 per cent, of the wounded recover.