HOW THE WAR AGAINST TRENCH FEVER WAS WON
One day last January four companies of so-called non-combatant soldiers
of the American army in France were lined up to listen to an address
from their officers. The men were members of the field hospital and
ambulance service. Their officers were army physicians. Working with
them were other eminent physicians, members of the medical research
department of the American Red Cross. This, or something like it, is
what these physicians said to the soldiers:
“Men, we have set ourselves to find out the cause and cure of one of
the worst diseases the allied armies have to suffer. It is called
trench fever. It is not a fatal disease, but it is slow and painful,
and it is so common as to be almost an epidemic. Its ravages are so
great that it actually hampers the allies in their struggle to win the
war. Something like five hundred thousand men a year are temporarily
pulled out of armies because of trench fever.
“The men have to leave the fighting line, go to hospitals and lie
there suffering and helpless for weeks on end. One fever does not
give positive immunity from others, and it is a fact that many men
have recurrent attacks. Trench fever is worst in Flanders, where the
British hold the front, but the French, Belgian and Serbian soldiers
also suffer from it. When the American army gets here in great numbers
we shall undoubtedly see thousands and thousands of our soldiers go
under from this disease. Before our men come we want to know what the
cause of trench fever is, and how to prevent it.
“We believe that the disease is carried by body lice, but we are not
sure. We have tried experiments on animals, guinea pigs and monkeys,
but they have not developed the fever. Now we have got to try more
experiments, this time on human beings. You remember that the cause of
yellow fever was discovered only after brave and devoted men allowed
themselves to be bitten by the stegomya mosquito, which was believed to
carry the disease. Some of those men died and others were brought to
the verge of death. But their deed banished the scourge of yellow fever
from the world. Now we are asking for volunteers to help us banish
trench fever.
“Men, what we are asking you to do is no easy or agreeable thing. We
are asking you to risk a lingering, painful and weakening illness, one
that will keep you in bed for five or six weeks and often make you wish
you were dead and out of it.
“You will not die, but you will suffer. You will have horrible
headaches, pains in your backs, shoulders, knees, abdomens. This
disease has been mistaken for appendicitis. It has often been called
shinbone fever. This will give you some idea of what trench fever
feels like.
“But we are calling for volunteers because we want to prevent any more
soldiers from having trench fever. We want to know what causes it, so
that we can find out how to prevent it. Fifty or sixty men, willing to
suffer these pains once, may prevent millions of men ever again from
suffering the same pains. They will do more, they will keep those men
in the fighting lines instead of the hospitals, and hence they will
importantly help to win the war. We want sixty volunteers. How many
have we?”
Four entire companies of field hospital and ambulance soldiers of a
certain American division in France were thus appealed to. The entire
four companies, as one man, stepped forward and volunteered. Of course
they did. That is the kind of soldiers we raised our boys to be.
I saw and talked to some of these men when they were recovering in a
hospital near Paris. They were a fine-looking lot of men, American
born, all of them, and all but one hailing from the New England states.
It just happened so. The division was drafted in the Atlantic states,
and these men were selected, regardless of their previous residence,
simply because among five or six hundred perfectly fit men they stood
out as being in the absolute pink of health and strength.
“We thought,” said one of these volunteers to me, “that we were going
to be sent up to a front-line trench and sleep in the mud with the
cooties till we got it. But to our surprise, they took us up to a
perfectly good hospital back of the British lines. Nice clean tents,
good beds, and food--um-m! Everything we could ask for.”
Even the cooties were clean, in a manner of speaking, for the doctors
were taking no chances with their experiment. They sent the eggs of
those unpleasant beasts to England, where no trench fever has ever
appeared, and when the eggs hatched out they put the beasts on trench
fever patients. Then they put them on the volunteers.
About fifty or sixty of the loathsome insects were put on a square
of cotton cloth and bound to the forearm of a soldier with strips of
adhesive plaster. A piece of surgical cotton over the cloth was well
bandaged on, and over the whole dressing a stronger cotton cuff was
securely fastened with more adhesive plaster. No possible chance for
the insects to escape remained.
Thirty-five soldiers were thus inoculated with trench fever. The rest
were reserved for blood inoculation tests. The men who had their
arms bound up as described endured an endless biting and chewing
from ten to fifteen days until they developed the fever. It was a
tormenting ordeal. Their arms became open sores from which blood and
pus penetrated the dressings. The first attack of fever and blinding
headache must have come as a welcome relief to intolerable itching.
Not a man but that came down with fever. One man ran a high temperature
for forty days and nights without a break, but with most of the men
the fever and the pain were remittent. Some suffered so severely that
the doctors were obliged to inject morphia.
Those men who were inoculated with the blood of the trench fever
patients developed the malady almost immediately. They suffered
variously with pain and fever, just as the others did.
“The monotony of it was bad,” said one of the men, a big teamster from
Boston. “Nothin’ to do but lay there and burn up and curse the pains
in your blasted legs. Next day you’d feel better, perhaps, but so weak
that you couldn’t move. The nurses were fine, and there was plenty to
eat. But we was too sick to care whether there were women around or
not, and the best stuff they gave us to eat tasted like sawdust.”
They agreed that the monotony of existence in trench fever was worse
than the pain. Life was a dreary waste. The eyes of the patients were
so affected that they were even denied the solace of reading.
The worst was yet to come for these devoted servants of science. When
the German drive began on the twenty-first of last March it was found
that their isolation hospital, thought to be so safe, was directly
in the line of attack. Lying in their beds, with nothing over them
but tent walls, their fever-racked bodies and weakened limbs became
tormented by the shriek of shells and the roar of artillery. German
airplanes chattered over their heads and bombs exploded around them.
“They wouldn’t let us get up and see the show,” grumbled one lad in
the rest hospital. “Some of us crawled to the door of the tent and
saw a little, but those English nurses shooed us back, and when it
got hotter they made us dive under the beds. They are dreadful stern,
those English nurses. You have to mind them as though they were the doc
himself.”
By March twenty-seventh the place had got too hot to hold invalids,
and the men were taken down to Paris. The journey was a fright. No
beds, little food or water, slow trains which took twenty-four hours to
traverse a distance of fifty-odd miles; but the men stood it, and when
I saw them in the hospital near Paris all but one was out of bed and on
the road to health. They were eating well, and more than one begged me
to “use my influence” to get them out of the hospital.
When a sick man begins to eat like a harvest hand and begs to get out
it indicates that he has only a few weeks of convalescence ahead of
him. At least that is what the head physician of the hospital told me
when I put in their petitions.
The cause of trench fever, thanks to our keen army and Red Cross
surgeons, and to the courageous men who volunteered to help them, has
definitely been established. The trench louse, once called a nuisance,
is now known to be almost as dangerous as the stegomya mosquito.
The trench louse must be got rid of, and that, happily, is not a very
difficult affair. Our American army authorities will take care of
that. And our sons, we may be thankful to know, are going to be spared
one of the most frequent and most painful afflictions of the war.
The scientists and physicians who took part in the experiment by which
trench fever is to be abolished will receive honors and rewards at the
hands of their colleagues and the public. What I would like to know, is
what honors and rewards those simple soldiers are going to receive.