The soldiers carry, in addition to the ordinary weapons, a trench spade, and in most cases large knives, which are used to cut away brush or dig in the earth when emergency demands. The close confinement in the trenches tends to develop disease, and the sanitary force of the modern army is a thing that was undreamed of in the olden days. More men died from disease during the Civil War than were killed by bullets or in hand-to-hand encounter.
The percentage of those who die from camp fever has been reduced to a minimum. Napoleon said that armies travel on their stomachs, but the European War and the Russian-Japanese War have proven, as did our campaigns in Cuba and Mexico, that soldiers live by reason of the health which they are permitted to maintain. Some idea of the conditions which developed in the trenches may be gained from a study of the various hospital reports, and investigations which have been made by physicians.
INFECTED WITH ASIATIC JAUNDICE.
Dr. Hideyo Noguchi, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, completed a series of experiments which showed that apparently healthy wild rats in the European war zone became infected with Weil's disease, or "infectious jaundice," common in Asia. Weil's disease is characterized by sudden onsets of malaise, often intense muscular pain, high fever for several days, followed by jaundice, frequently accompanied by complications. It becomes more virulent as it is successively transmitted from one victim to another. This is supposed to explain the much greater mortality, about 38 per cent. in Japan, as compared with from 2 to 3 per cent. among European soldiers.
The study of the disease was made possible by the successful importation from Japan and Flanders of guinea pigs and rats which had been inoculated with the causative organism in those two countries. Experiments previously made showed that the germ of the disease was carried in the kidneys of a large percentage of apparently healthy wild rats caught near the districts where the disease had been epidemic. Experiments in Europe demonstrated the presence of the germ in rats not only near the infected zones, but also in captured localities some distance from trenches.
For purposes of comparison Dr. Noguchi collected a number of rats in this country and removed their kidneys. His report states that by inoculating the emulsion made of the kidneys of 41 wild rats into 58 guinea pigs during a period of three months, he had been able to produce in three groups of guinea pigs typical cases of infectious jaundice altogether identical with the findings in the guinea pigs which died of the injection of the Japanese and Belgian strains of the disease. The germs taken from wild rats caught near New York produced death in guinea pigs within nine to twelve days.
AMERICA'S GREAT SERVICE IN WAR ZONE.
In studying the conditions and helping to fight the dangers encountered in the battlefields and camps of Europe, no country in the world rendered a greater service than America. Long before the country entered the war hundreds of American nurses, ambulance drivers and surgeons were on the battlefields and in the hospitals of Belgium, France and England. Men who were leaders in the medical and surgical world gave their services to the Allies, and almost every hospital in the United States sent some of its staff.
Through the efforts and study of Dr. Alexis Carrel, of New York, deaths from wounds received in battle were reduced almost 90 per cent. by a system of treatment which he devised. Dr. Carrel began his work in 1914, at Compiegne, in connection with the military hospital, and in collaboration with the Dakin Research Laboratory, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Using a solution of sodium hypochlorite, the plain method of treating wounds which proved such a great boon, was described at the Congress of Surgeons in Philadelphia in 1916, where many of the wonders of war surgery were described. By means of a rubber tube, which is run through or into the wound, the injury is flushed continuously by the solution, for a period of hours or minutes, according to the nature and character of the wound.