ry camps at that time, there were 20,738 cases of
typhoid fever, and the number of those which were fatal constituted 86
per cent of all the deaths from disease during this campaign. It was
shown by the commission appointed to investigate the matter that the
spread of the disease was not due to water or to food, but in most cases
to the direct transmission of the germs through the agency of flies. In
the Japanese and Russian war, where in the Japanese army of over a
million men only 299 deaths from typhoid occurred, strict measures were
taken to do away with all the breeding places of flies, and Major
Seaman, who writes most interestingly on the success of the Japanese in
avoiding typhoid, describes the ways in which the Japanese soldiers made
flycatchers of themselves and waged war against flies quite as actively
as against the Russians.

_Other sources of typhoid fever._

There are other sources of the disease; for instance, there have been a
number of small epidemics undoubtedly caused by infected oysters. One
of the unpleasant habits of the oystermen is to bring in oysters from
the ocean and leave them for a few days in shallow water where they may
plump up or fatten, and they have found by experience that this
fattening occurs more rapidly in dirty water. If the oysters are
fattened in sewage-polluted water, the typhoid germs get inside the
shell in the oyster liquor and are thus transmitted to those persons who
eat the oysters raw.

Some kinds of food may transmit the disease: lettuce and celery, for
instance, if washed in contaminated water or handled by persons with
unclean hands or perhaps fertilized with manure containing typhoid
germs. Finally, it is possible to acquire the disease by direct
contact--not that the germs of typhoid are in the air in the room where
a typhoid fever patient is lying, but rather that the nurse in some way
soils her hands and then infects herself by putting her fingers in her
mouth, or handles dishes or food afterwards used by other people, and so
infects those others. It is not uncommon, for example, to see food
partly consumed by a sick person given to children, or it may be that a
child in the sick room is fed dainties prepared for the use of the
patient. The result of such division of food is very apt to be a
division of the sickness to the injury of the child.

_Treatment of typhoid fever._

So far as present knowledge extends, the disease is one best treated by
being let