CURRENT LITERAT ITRE.
TYPHOID AND WAR.
Typhoid, the Destroyer of Armies, and its Abolition. By Leigh Canney, M.D. (Bailliere, Tindall, and Co. is. net.)—In the truly admirable little pamphlet which Dr. Canney has just published he places the true reason for blaming the recent medical work of our War Office in a new and striking light. It is beside the point—though often useful and necessary in its way —to attack the mismanagement of our field hospitals in the South African War; the real gravamen of the charge against our military authorities is that they failed to take any steps to ward off preventible disease from our troops, although medical science has of late years proclaimed no truth more loudly than that of the need and the possibility of such steps. Our recent experi- ences in the Boer War, as Dr. Canney says, "reveal a condition of want of foresight and indifference to hygiene on the part of those at the head of the War Office when this war broke out that would have been discreditable in civil life in the adminis- tration of the remotest village of England or Scotland." No truth is better established than the fact that the three great !mimes of armies from time immemorial, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery, are almost always, if not invariably, due to the dis- semination of their germs in drinking water. It is also clearly proved that the most dangerous water is rendered wholesome by boiling, and that no other preventive need be practically con- sidered. Yet no serious attempt was made to protect our army from the ravages of the bacilli that have proved—as at Walcheren or in the Crimea—immensely more destructive than any human enemy. What is the good of living in an age of science if its teachings are to be disregarded in this calm and costly way? We hope that every one to whom the loss of a single soldier by disease is a real or a possible sorrow will study Dr. Canney's brief and luminous argument, and will then do his or her share to render it impossible for any British army again to be delivered helplessly to such a plague of misery and danger as threatened to descend on all who drank the envenomed waters of the Paardeberg River because no effort had been made to provide a substitute. Dr. Canney sketches an ingenious, andy as it seems to us, a perfectly practicable, scheme for providing an army with water which is, if not absolutely pure, at least free from the germs of disease. A Water Corps should be attached, he says, to every army, whose transport would come second only to that of the day's ammunition, and whose duty would be to Provide boiled, and therefore immune, water for the troops at every halt ; he shows how easily this can be done with the proper apparatus. As to the argument that "Tommy will drink where he pleases," there is little or nothing in it. Our soldiers are not such fools as to despise cover, though they can go ahead without it when duty calls. What cover is to the rifleman in the firing. line, that is boiled water to the soldier in general. As Dr. Cattney says, it should not be difficult to create a feeling that it is "dishonourable and a crime" in a soldier to throw away his life—or his usefulness—by drinking unboiled water if a sufficient supply of a safe beverage were always available. We honestly believe that the thorough adoption of such a scheme as Dr. Canney has described would be a greater boon to an army than even the work of Miss Nightingale was to our troops in the Crimea, if it did not realise his own ideal of making the military life, in war as in peace," the healthiest occupation of the com- munity."
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