Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/266

252 addition to the articles which had been published by 1 July 1946, 14 others had been completed and were ready for publication, and 28 more were in progress. 14

These scientific investigations were not "mere academic research projects," Dr. Howard T. Karsner wrote in 1944, but were in large part such studies as had "immediate application." 15 As an example of immediacy of application, Dr. Karsner cited the part played by the Medical Museum in scotching the subterranean rumor that the outbreak of hepatitis in the Army in the spring and early summer of 1942 was actually yellow fever following vaccination against that disease. Color of support for the rumor was found in the undenied fact that troops were being given "shots" for yellow fever, and the further fact that the most obvious and visible symptom of both yellow fever and hepatitis was the jaundiced hue cast by both over the sufferers.

The diseases, however, were very different in their effects. Hepatitis, while it is exceedingly debilitating and distressing to its victims, is not a disease of high mortality, the death rate being less than three-tenths of 1 percent of hospitalized cases. In disablement and deadliness, hepatitis was not to be compared with yellow fever, but there was enough plausibility in the rumor that "yellow jack" had returned to the Army through the hypodermic syringe of the surgeon to make it damaging to morale.

Fortunately, before the alarmist rumor was well spread, the Medical Museum had completed its special study of three early fatal cases of hepatitis- one each from Fort Belvoir, Va.; Camp Callan, Calif.; and Walter Reed General Hospital— and had circulated its findings to the laboratory chiefs of Army hospitals for the information of "officers who may not have had an opportunity to study at first hand the pathology of fatal hepatitis." The findings were accompanied by clinical notes and microscope slides. 16 "Because of the current interest in yellow fever," there went with the reports like information about an authentic case of yellow fever which had caused the death of a young man in Brazil in 1937. As Colonel Lucké (fig. 79), who had prepared the notes and materials on both diseases, pointed out, the differences between them, when seen under the pathologist's microscope, are so obvious that "it will be seen at once" that they are not the same. The putative epidemic of yellow fever was demonstrated to be hepatitis — a demonstration which was clinched by continued study, the results of which are embodied in