# Stalking The Pestilence

IN ALL the long red history of war, disease has stalked at the heels of armies. In the present generation it bids fair to cease stalking, at least at the heels of armies that are scientifically and modernly handled. I have just been studying the mortality statistics of Vera Cruz for the last sixteen months. There is a peculiar blank space at the head of the column marked "Cerebro-spinal Meningitis." For the first six months of 1913 there were no deaths from meningitis. In July there were three deaths. By December, in that month alone, there were twenty deaths. The abrupt appearance of this disease led me to inquire of Major F. M. Hartsock for an explanation.
Conquering the Grisly Monster, Typhoid
WHAT the adventures of this meningitis will be now that it has again gone wandering may be imagined. The very clothing of these men, as well as themselves, is saturated with meningitis, and that they will spread the infection cannot be doubted. At any rate, the times have changed, for the disease left town with old-fashioned war when modern war marched in.
The Weapons—Sanitation and Vaccination
IN 1911, in San Antonio, Tex., 12,000 soldiers were mobilized for four months. During this period there were two cases of typhoid and no deaths. In 1913 and 1914, at Texas City and Galveston, 12,000 soldiers were in camp for many months, during which there was not a single death from typhoid nor a single case of typhoid. In this last long mobilization all other infectious diseases were practically negligible. In the year 1913, in the entire army of the United States, whether stationed at home, in Panama, Hawaii, or the Philippines, there were only six cases of typhoid. This remarkable record, covering so brief a period of time, has been made possible by two things: first, the education of soldiers in camp sanitation and personal hygiene; and, second, the inoculation, or vaccination, of the soldiers against typhoid.
Uncle Sam's Sure Method
THE United States was the first country to inoculate its soldiers and sailors against typhoid, and it is safe to assume, no matter in what other ways its soldiers may lose their lives in Mexico, that none will die from typhoid. The serum is hypodermically injected into the arm in a series of three injections, the intervals between injections being ten days. In a way, the injectee becomes a sort of peripatetic graveyard. The first injection puts into his blood the nicely dead carcasses of some 500,000,000 microorganisms along with all their virtues of deadness which bring about a change in the constitution of the blood that makes it resistant to future invasions of full-powered, malignant typhoid microorganisms. With this first injection, theoretically, the man has had reduced the 100 per cent of his nonimmunity to typhoid to 32 per cent.
No Indisposition from Inoculation
IT IS very easy, the actual process of inoculation. I have had the pleasure of reducing my nonimmunity of 100 per cent to zero per cent. The first inoculation was perpetrated in a transport hospital, the second in a captured academy turned into an army hospital, the third in a field hospital. The stab of the hypodermic syringe, different from the manner of administering morphine just under the skin, goes straight down and squarely down into the meat of the arm for half an inch; but the pang of the stab is no severer. The hurt of the stab is over the instant the skin is punctured. It is only the nerves of the skin that protest in either case.
Surgeon Pioneers
NO HEALTHY recruit, having successfully passed the rigid physical examination, is any longer permitted immediately to join the organization to which he is allotted. Healthy recruits have a way of coming down with all sorts of diseases as soon as they change their environment, particularly with measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough, and scarlet fever. In the old days so recent, before it was understood, the recruits spread these diseases among the regiments they joined.
The Petrolero to the Front
YELLOW fever is so simple a thing to manage. Yet we paid a terrible death penalty for our ignorance through all the centuries down to just the other day. We know now that a certain breed of mosquito is the only carrier of the disease. We know that the way such a mosquito becomes infected is by biting a human being who is stricken with yellow fever. We know that only in the first three days that a human being is so stricken is it possible for the uninfected mosquito to become infected.
Putting the Taxes at Hones Work
THE authorities at Vera Cruz did not know as much about their own water supply as did our army surgeons before our expedition started. They knew that the source of the water supply, the Jamapa River, was a fast-flowing stream and uncontaminated. Also, to make doubly sure, they were in possession of analyses of the water.
Hosplitals First
THE hotels and cantinas are crowded with thirsty refugees, soldiers, sailors, and foreign guests, all with a penchant for long, cool drinks. More ice than ordinarily is consumed. The ice plant is a private enterprise. Its output is limited. There is not enough to go around. Hotels and cantinas are cash buyers and pay a premium for ice. Result: (a) the hospitals are skimped in ice; (b) the surgeons make the suggestion and the army takes charge of the ice plant, supplying the hospitals first and letting the hotels and cantinas have what is left.
Sleeping and Wobbling Bullets
ALMOST precisely the same thing occurs with the modern bullet. Its first flight is something like seven hundred yards. During this period, like the top, it is erratic. It wobbles. If it hits anything while it is wobbling, a bad smashup is inevitable. In its mid flight, between seven hundred and twelve hundred yards, it "sleeps." If it hits anything while it is sleeping, it drills a clean hole. From twelve hundred yards on, losing momentum and equilibrium, it again wobbles, and this is no time to be struck by it.
High-Velocity Bone Shatterers
THE effect of such bullets on human bone can be readily imagined. There is no reason, with modern antiseptic surgery, why a clean-drilled hold thorough flesh and bone cannot be healed nicely. Unfortunately, such being the terrific impact and wobble of our high-velocity bullets of to-day, the bone is shattered for to great a distance into too many minute fragments. The only thing to do is take off the limb.
Blasters of Flesh—and Repairers
THE statues of Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints that had graced the altar were long since gone. Gone, too, was the altar. Nothing remained save the lofty alls and cool depth of shadow to suggest that it had been a chapel. And as I stood in this place whence the worship of the gentle Nazarene had departed, strong on my vision were the amputated limbs, gaping wounds, and ruined bodies caused by our wobbling bullets.
Laughs for Our Descendants
SOME day in the far future pictures will be pained like that, and our descendants will gaze at them, shake their heads, and laugh at their silly ancestors, just as we to-day gaze at pictures of witch burning, and shake our heads and laugh at the silliness of our very immediate ancestors. Man has climbed far. It would seem that his climb has only begun.
The Arkansas and the Solace
OVER a thousand skilled men are required to man her—skilled men such as built the Panama Canal and whose skill might well be devoted to making the Mississippi flood proof. Why, down in the bowels of the Arkansas, imbedded in the thickest of armor plate, in the battle control station, an enlisted sailor in the course of describing the new gyro-compass, gave me a lecture that no college professor could have bettered and that no tyro in such matters could have understood. Could Columbus or Captain Cook have stood beside me, and tried to master the details of that intricate compass, I swear their brains would have flown apart and they would have bitten their veins and howled.
The Price of Service
PASSING through the wards, one was again struck by the preponderance of youth. Lord, Lord! They were boys, healthy-bodied and lusty so short a time before, now lying, lax-muscled, with drawn faces that told all the story of the body blasting they had endured. One, alive and so lively just the other day, now with one leg, searched my eyes as if for understanding and sympathy for the terrible stump that screamed advertisement of the copper he had received—smashed down, from the back of life, to be a cripple to the end of his days. Another, a very boy, red-lipped and bright-eyed with fever, smiled wistfully. There was little hope for him. He was conscious, and, perhaps as men sometimes will be in such grievous circumstances, he was aware that time would soon cease for him.
The Dove Among the Eagles
THE beautiful operating room was well appointed. There were convalescent wards, segregated wards for infectious diseases, and, here and there, offices and workrooms presided over by experts, such as ear and throat specialists, eye specialists, stomach specialists. And there was a dentist and a completely equipped dental parlor.
Is the Nation So Poor?
SURELY the United States, that pays twelve to fifteen million dollars for ships like the Arkansas, the Texas, and the New York, should be able to afford the modest cost of a real hospital ship, designed, not for the making of dollars, but for the alleviation of the ills and injuries that afflict its sailors and marines.
Arms and Savagery
ON a coral beach on the windward coast of Gudalcanar stands a monument to the memory of the "Austrian Expedition." This was a party of professors. They were equipped to pursue the vocations that obtain in a high civilization. They carried sextants, barometers, thermometers, artificial horizons, cameras, and fountain pens. They carried naturalists' shotguns of the tiniest caliber, butterfly nets, geologists' hammers, and notebooks for all sorts of records, also certain instruments with which to make skull measurements of the natives they might meet. But what they did not carry was Mauser rifles and long-barreled revolvers. They were not equipped for the anthropophagi they encountered. One man came back from that expedition to tell the tail, and he was merely a man in the employ of the professors. The column stands on the beach to mark that once they had been. Their heads remain to this day up in the bush of Guadalcanar.
And There We Are
BUT in the meantime—and there you are—what would have been the present situation if the United States had long since disarmed? Somehow, I, for one, cannot see the picture of Huerta listening to and accepting the high ethical advice of the United States.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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