Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/161

TRIUMPH OVER TYPHOID pathologists — Doctors William T. Councilman, distinguished for his researches in amebic dysentery ; Simon Flexner, first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Alexander Lambert, a distinguished internist of New York; J. H. Musser, of the distinguished Philadelphia school of practitioners of internal medicine; William S. Thayer of the Johns Hopkins faculty; and Victor C. Vaughan, surviving member of the Reed-Vaughan-Shakespeare Board — with Capt. F. F. Russell as recorder.

After studying the evidence, this Board concluded that "the practice of anti-typhoid vaccination is both useful and harmless and that it offers a practicable means of diminishing the amount of typhoid fever in the Army both in times of peace and war." The Board accordingly recommended that in time of war the practice be introduced in both the regular and volunteer forces, and that it be introduced immediately on a voluntary basis in the medical units, with an opportunity for volunteers from the Army as a whole to receive the protection of vaccination. 27 The findings and recommendations of the Board were approved and published in 1909, in War Department General Orders No. 10.

Meanwhile, Major Russell (he was promoted in 1909) was busy with preparations for vaccinating the volunteers, the first of whom came from the Army Medical Museum and the Medical School (fig. 47). A "special room in the Army Medical Museum was fitted up as a vaccine laboratory," entirely separate from the School. The new laboratory, with "complete equipment of entirely new apparatus, specially planned for this particular purpose" of manufacturing vaccine, was completed in February 1909, and in March, vaccination on a wholesale scale began. 28

Eight hundred and thirty volunteers were vaccinated by the time the 1909 report of the Surgeon General was issued, without untoward incident. By the end of the next year, 10,841 volunteers had received "shots." In March 1911, because of troubles on the Mexican border, an entire division of the Army was mobilized in Texas. For this mobilization, vaccination was made compulsory for military personnel — and with more than 10,000 men in camp, the only death from typhoid was that of a civilian teamster who had refused vaccination. "It is hard to credit the accuracy of such a record," declared President William Howard Taft, addressing the Medical Club of Philadelphia on 4 May 1911. "But, as I have it directly from the War Office," he added, "I can assert it as one more instance of the marvelous efficacy of recent medical discoveries and practice" —