Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 57.djvu/255

Rh were six cases, but no deaths. In Bangalore, among 80,285 of the inhabitants not inoculated, there were 2,208 deaths from plague, while among 23,537 inoculated there were only 108. The observations at Lanowli, Kirkee, Daman, Hubli, Dharwar, Gadag, in the Bombay Presidency, gave the same results. At Hubli over forty-two thousand inhabitants out of some fifty thousand were inoculated. In Bombay city, out of a population of 821,764, 157,256 have now undergone the i n< 'dilation. The work proceeds here at present at the rate of one thousand to eleven hundred inoculations a day.

From plague hospitals the returns show that among those of the attacked who were previously inoculated the mortality is reduced to less than one half of that among patients who were not inoculated. The property of reducing the case mortality thus appears to belong to the plague prophylactic in an unmistakable degree.

By the anti-cholera and anti-plague inoculation the methods of preventive treatment by means of cultivated bacteria and their products have been rendered, so to say, a part of the daily policy in human medicine. The usefulness and practicability of those methods have become clearly apparent, and steps have been taken to extend further the field of their application. On the ground of the experiments made with the typhoid bacillus in the Pasteur Institute in 1889-'93, and of the results obtained from the anticholera inoculation in India, I was able to induce Professor Wright, of the Pathological Laboratory in Net ley. whom I initiated in 1892 in the principles and technique of anti-cholera inoculation, to start a campaign of similar operations against typhoid among the British troops. The latter are stationed at different times of their service very nearly in all parts of the world, and yearly pay a very heavy tribute to that disease. The medical officers in charge of these troops pass through a course of training at Netley, and Professor Wright had rendered excellent services in connection with the cholera inoculations, by disseminating the knowledge of them among the probationers of the school. It seemed to me expedient, therefore, to start the typhoid inoculation also through the staff and pupils of that school. The following plan as to the preparation of the vaccine, and the way of carrying out the inoculation, was laid before Professor Wright. The typhoid bacillus was to be brought to a fixed stage of virulence by the inoculation in the peritoneal cavity of Guinea pigs, according to the exact rules prescribed for the anti-cholera inoculation. Once the virus was fixed, it was to be cultivated for twenty-four hours on a solid medium, and a first vaccine prepared by carbolizing that virus. As, however, the durability of the effect of carbolized vaccine alone was not known, this was to be followed up by the injection of a dose of the fixed living virus.