THE INFLUENZA.
ONE of the first duties of Parliament, when it meets in February, will be to order an exhaustive inquiry into the information collected as to the Influenza. The ignorance of the doctors as to the causes of the disorder, an ignorance which is fully acknowledged by the chiefs of the medical profession, is fast becoming a national calamity. The fever, at first regarded as an accidental exaggeration of the ancient malady called " cold," has now reappeared for the third time, over an increased area, and with an accentuated virulence. The majority attacked by it still escape death ; but a minority, apparently including all who have any liability to lung-disease or any inherent weakness of constitution, are killed by it as rapidly and certainly as by the great malaria fevers of which the world entertains such fear. They die, like the Duke of Clarence, within a week of seizure, no possession of means, no medical skill, and no perfection of nursing, appearing to afford them the least protection. The victims are not, as we thought last year, picked from among the officers of the social army, for the general death-rate rises sharply; but the disease betrays a distinct malignity towards the old, who, in the modern system of society, are those who are the most important, and therefore the most missed. Men over sixty, if fairly seized by the pest, in a day or two develop pneumonia—that is, acute inflammation of the lungs and delirium—and then, unless they are exceptionally strong, they die within a week. Though the disease does not spare the poor, there is hardly a known family in the country without a victim, and the list of the dead every day actually alters the appearance of the first page of the Times. There is no flying from the attack, for it appears everywhere, in all countries, and on all continents, besides raging occasionally on board ship ; and no means of avoiding it, for no one knows in the least to what circumstance an attack is due. The cause, by the sufferers' testimony, is usually "a chill," but a chill may come from anything, and in this climate is hardly to be avoided by any except invalids, who again, in hospital at all events, are by no means certainly exempt. So widespread is the pest that doctors everywhere are exhausted with work, and that the demand for trained nurses has completely beaten the supply. On one day this week there was not in London a single unem- ployed nurse, while five times as many as exist would have been eagerly employed at enhanced rates. Whether the dis- order is strictly infectious, is still doubtful, for a condition of " liability " seems still essential to seizure ; but wherever men work in crowds —that is, wherever work is important —they are seized in dozens, until occasionally whole depart- ments of effort are perforce suspended. The malignity of the disorder, too, increases. Men apparently in full health are struck by it without warning, so that an omnibus-driver suddenly drops his reins and is only held by passengers on the box, and that a professional man driving to his office stops his hansom, drives back, and is taken out of the cab in full delirium. There is no security, either, that the disease will not grow worse and worse. The medical profession have an idea, derived from its past history, that it will disappear as suddenly as it came ; but they can produce no reason for this, and they were even more confident during the last attack, which, though more serious than the first one, did not kill as rapidly as the third has done. For anything that anybody can tell, " influenza" may recur every year, or twice a year—the last attack was at its height in May— increasing each time in potency until it assumes the pro- portions of a veritable plague, with an apparent mission to slaughter out all the weak of the community, including a majority of the old.
It is useless to treat a disease of this kind as anything but a dangerous epidemic, and in all epidemics the grand thing for the laity to do is to search, not for cures—the doctors will, in their own interest, do that—but for causes, which when known will suggest preventives. It is not quinine, but drainage, and a knowledge of the conditions of malaria, which have nearly extinguished ague ; and the comparative immunity of this country from cholera is due first of all to the certainty that the grand agent, if not the sole agent, in its transmission is infected water. We know how to prevent small-pox, to isolate scarlet-fever, and to cleanse a typhoidal district, but about the prevention of influenza we know positively nothing. It certainly travels through the air, for it strikes ships still at sea, and appears in a hundred places at once, and there is ground for believing, we are told, that its victims are " poisoned by the entrance of a living organism into the body, either through the mouth, or, as some evidence would suggest, the eyes ;" but nothing is certain, and until there is certainty there can be no pre- ventive, which, and not cure, should be the national object of search. Dr. Pfeiffer's discovery of an influenza bacillus does not help the world in the least, for granting the carefulness of his experiments, and the accuracy of his inductions—and we should be slow to grant either, after the insignificant result of the Koch craze—the existence of a microscopic worm in a diseased lung neither tells us how it got there, nor how to get it out. The pre- ventive can only be discovered, if at all, by the comparison of a mass of evidence best secured by a Commission acting under the sanction of Parliament, which, as soon as it meets, will probably have ample provocation to activity. The Commons were struck last year in quite exceptional proportion, and obtained little benefit from the war they declared with -sulphur fumigations against suspected microbes. This time they may suffer more heavily. Whatever the mysterious " influence " is, whether poisoned air or flights of new animalcules, or a descent from high sata of the atmosphere of clouds of gaseous particles originally thrown out in some volcanic explosion, the Members of the House will all be exposed to it alike ; they all sit under a cloud of each other's breath, and they are nearly all persons advanced in years, with some weak point or other in their constitutions. We may have whole Cabinets laid up at once, and parties disorganised, because those who would have composed a majority are all " down" with a fell disease, which appears to be consciously malignant against all its victims if they refuse or even hesitate to retire to bed. That is the single truth the doctors have apparently ascer- tained past doubt. To do your duty as our fathers under- stood it, and fight against illness to the last, succumbing only when the physical power to keep up has disappeared, is to invite death, and render the effort of science to aid you hopeless from the beginning. " Relapse " is bad enough, but it is not so bad as holding out when once the demon has announced that he is coming with the hot pincers with which, after a warning of shivers, he begins his deadlier attack. Of all men, Members of Parliament dislike shirking most, because their masters are the most pitiless, and they, therefore, will suffer most acutely.
We trust, therefore, and believe the House of Commons, which wili spend any sum on its own comfort, will be stirred into activity ; but, of course, there is the chance that its activity may be useless. The notion that modern science can find out everything, is a pure illusion. It does not know how the Black Death came, any more than it knows how hydrophobia begins, and would be as powerless to arrest another visitation of the same kind as it is to prevent toothache. We all suppose that such visitations are over ; but there is no reason for the supposition, except that the vitality of the population has much increased, which, as regards large classes, is by no means a com- pletely demonstrated proposition, though it is as regards the whole community. We may trust the " mercy of Pro- vidence " if we please, but the mercy of Providence is not our mercy,—it spares none of us alive, and the human reason can discover no cause for leaving our people unvisited with a great epidemic which should not also have spared the unhappy population in the Valley of the Volga from their visitation of famine. We may discover a cure for " in- fluenza with pneumonic complications," as we have dis- covered a cure for ague ; and we may not, as we have not discovered a cure for the ever-increasing ravages of cancer. We know nothing whatever about it, except that healthy living, good shelter, and perfect hygienic drainage do not protect us in the least, the heir to the Throne dying of it just as readily as the lowest costermonger. The visitation may pass, but it may also develop into one of those epidemics which break the strength of nations, and might teach us all, if we ever learned anything, not to chatter so glibly about the "dangerous rate of increase, which threatens before long to overwhelm civilisation." Mos- quitoes never swarm so thick or display such an activity as just before a cyclone, after which for half-an-hour they are neither quite so numerous nor quite so energetic in the pursuit of pleasant food.
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