Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/571

Rh adjacent county that their readers were victims of a disease which should be fought by quarantine. School boards did not care to dislocate the machinery of their system. Manufacturers pleaded for the families likely to be ruined if their works were shut down. In the minds of many there were a shame and a disgrace associated with the fact that they were singled out for the explosions of the pest; and there was some reason for this. Hence, in a considerable proportion of cases, the officers of local government, the large employers of labor, school superintendents and others refused to accept the facts, basing their belief on the evident mildness of the malady, and often upon the remarkable result that after a fortnight or more of the prevalence of the disease in their community there had been either no fatal results or so few that in several hundreds of cases the disproportionate mortality was so small as to disprove the accusation that smallpox was prevalent.

And yet smallpox indeed it was; mitigated, it is true, but still capable of awaking to a frightful activity in a favorable field and at an opportune moment. For it is among the facts established by a bitter experience that the mildest and most modified type of the disease, varioloid, for example, of insignificant features, may be the source of one of those epidemics of smallpox which rival in their mortality the most direful of the scourges that have afflicted the race.

Why was the late epidemic the mildest in its type and consequences of any of the same nature that have preceded it? Why were its features so masked that even physicians of experience failed to recognize them? Why was the resulting mortality so slight that the malady awakened little dread in the communities which it invaded, the people, made familiar by contact with its manifestations, failing to exhibit the horror which has usually been excited by its presence?

The answer is inwrought with the solution of some of the tremendous problems of the future of the human race. If devastating plagues cannot be wholly obliterated, can they be so modified by scientific methods that they are gradually converted into trifling ailments, productive of minimized danger and followed by trifling sequels? The culture-tubes and culture-plates of our bacteriological laboratories have spelled out the answer in sterilized media. The potency of almost all germs may be first gradually weakened and later annihilated by cultivation in special soils. Fraenkel has demonstrated that an enduring decrease, even a complete and irrevocable loss of virulence, has been produced by artificial cultivation of most of the different species of pathogenic bacteria, among which may be cited as conspicuous examples the germs of swine-erysipelas, of symptomatic anthrax and of pneumonia. Thus a minute organism, descended from a death-dealing source, may