Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/153

TRIUMPH OVER TYPHOID osition to term the disease "Chickamauga fever" and to ascribe it to "a miasma that arises nightly from the river and permeates the camp." 7 The laboratory at this camp, in charge of Acting Assistant Surgeon Charles F. Craig, was supplied with materials for its tests from pure cultures furnished by the Army Medical Museum and the Johns Hopkins University. 8 In October 1898, the Board was back in Washington and at work on the laborious task of studying the detailed medical records of 118 regiments which were, or had been, in the national encampments. Leaving out of account the records of 20 regiments, which were so defective that they were discarded, the Board checked every man shown on sick report who might have been a typhoid case, tracing him through the regimental, division, and general hospitals, and even the civilian hospitals to which many men had been sent, in order to learn the course and the outcome of the disease. In 48 regiments, the subsequent medical history of every man with a short diarrhea or a supposed malarial attack was checked, in order to see whether they afterward showed a greater or a lesser susceptibility to typhoid fever. In all regiments studied, the analysis of the start and spread of the disease was localized by companies; in many regiments, it was carried down even to the squad, with the date and order of occurrence of the disease listed by individual tents. At the end of June 1899, the appropriation for the work of the Typhoid Board ran out, and Doctors Vaughan and Shakespeare were relieved from duty. They continued the work on their own account, however, dividing the sick reports and taking them to their respective homes for further analysis. On 2 June 1900, a meeting of the members of the Board was to have been held, but on the day before the appointed meeting, Dr. Shakespeare died. Three weeks later, Major Reed was on his way to Cuba to meet the menace of yellow fever; Dean Vaughan, however, had prepared an abstract of the findings of the Board, which was concurred in by Major Reed, and was published in 1900.

The abstract, however, did not carry the convincing authority of the supporting evidence, and in 1903, largely at the instance of Elihu Root, Secretary of War, the Congress provided the funds for publication of the full report. In the meanwhile, Major Reed had died, leaving the task of putting the full