e a certain degree.

Simple as these methods sound, they are extremely troublesome to put
into execution, and require the greatest skill and judgment in their
carrying out. But intelligent persistence in the careful elaboration of
these methods of nature has resulted in already cutting the death-rate
in two,--from fifteen or twenty per cent to less than ten per cent,--and
where the full rigor of the tub bath is carried out it has been brought
down to as low as five per cent.

Meanwhile the bacteriologists are steadily at work on a vaccine or
antitoxin. Wright, of the English Army Medical Staff, has already
secured a serum, which has given remarkable results in protecting
regiments sent out to South Africa and other infected regions.
Chantemesse has imported some six hundred successive cases treated with
an antitoxin, whose mortality was only about a third of the ordinary
hospital rate, and the future is full of promise.

CHAPTER X

DIPHTHERIA

That was a dark and stern saying, "Without the shedding of blood there
is no remission," and, like all the words of the oracles, of limited
application. But it proves true in some unexpected places outside of the
realm of theology. Was there something prophetic in the legend that it
was only by the sprinkling of the blood of the Paschal Lamb above the
doorway that the plague of the firstborn could be stayed? To-day the
guinea-pig is our burnt offering against a plague as deadly as any sent
into Egypt.

Scarcely more than a decade ago, as the mother sat by the cradle of her
firstborn, musing over his future, one moment fearfully reckoning the
gauntlet of risks that his tiny life had to run, and the next building
rosy air-castles of his happiness and success, there was one shadow that
ever fell black and sinister across his tiny horoscope. Certain risks
there were which were almost inevitable,--initiation ceremonies into
life, mild expiations to be paid to the gods of the modern underworld,
the diseases of infancy and of childhood. Most of these could be passed
over with little more than a temporary wrinkle to break her smile. They
were so trivial, so comparatively harmless: measles, a mere reddening of
the eyelids and peppering of the throat, with a headache and purplish
rash, dangerous only if neglected; chicken-pox, a child's-play at
disease; scarlatina, a little more serious, but still with the chances
of twenty to one in favor of recovery; diphtheria--ah! that dr