ANTI-TYPHOID INOCULATION.

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I

Sanitary Association and promises

to prove of wide interest. ANTI-TYPHOID INOCULATION. The exhibits will be arranged in different sections, a separate z’ THE Advisory Committee in Anti-typhoid Inoculation, section being allotted to work done by ladies, amateur and which was appointed by the Secretary of State for War professional. The hygiene section comprehends exhibits of (1) some months ago, having reported to the Army Council water-supplies and filtration ; (2) drainage and the modern that a substantial reduction in the incidence and death-rate system of sewage disposal ; (3) infectious diseases and their from fever had been achieved in the army by Protyphoid prevention, disinfection ; (4) ventilation of buildings and fessor A. E. Wright’s system of anti-typhoid inoculation, factories; (5) modern sanitary appliances ; (6) food and and recommended that this system, which was having milk, their values and preservation ; (7) conservancy and abandoned at the instance of the Medical Advisory Board, refuse disposal; (8) model dwellings; and (9) literature relatshould be resumed in the army, a commencement is about ing to sanitation. This comprehensive list should produce to be made by inoculating volunteers from the 2nd Battalion exhibition and help forward sanitation an interesting Fusiliers which is shortly to proceed to India. throughout the Indian Empire. A useful addendum is Royal The position of anti-typhoid inoculation as a scientific the proposal to have demonstrations and lectures on method of therapeutics, and the action of the Army Advisory subjects appertaining to tropical hygiene and sanitaof various Committees constituted by the War tion, the lectures to be illustrated by limelight, micro- Board, and of Professor Office, Wright, the inaugurator of the scopic and lantern demonstrations. are well in a leading article in the -7intes of set out method, Oct. 27th. Professor Wright’s papers on the subject and the statistics which have so far been forthcoming in support, or ANGINA PECTORIS AND ARTERIO-SCLEROSIS. AT the recent annual meeting of the American Medical otherwise, of anti-typhoid inoculation have all been published Association Professor William Osler read an important in our columns, and we make no doubt that most of our readers will find themselves in accord with the Times and paper on the Relation of Angina Pectoris to Arteriosclerosis. He pointed out that although the association with ourselves in considering the whole story a curious of disease of the coronary arteries with angina pectoris one. Professor Wright and Dr. W. Bulloch have resigned is one of the best attested facts of pathology, yet it their seats on the Anti-typhoid Committee, as they are of has not helped much to explain the mysterious nature opinion that the further improvement of the process of antiof the pain or the other phenomena of the paroxysm. typhoid inoculation and the study of the problem of Arterial disease of other parts is also associated with immunity against typhoid fever can be properly carried out pain. In the head there are the association of migraine only by the agency of a permanent working committee, with arterial disease, the severe and characteristic head- consisting of civilian experts and Royal Army Medical Corps aches of high blood pressure, and the agonising pain officers. in some cases of cerebral embolism, more rarely in AT a largely attended meeting of the council of the thrombosis. In lesions of the mesenteric arteries there British Medical Association held on Oct. 19th it was may be severe abdominal pain. But it is in sclerosis resolved that the gold medal of the Association should be of the arteries of the limbs that the most remarkable disawarded to Sir Constantine Holman for his distinguished turbances of sensation are met. There may be (1) simple services to the Association. Sir Constantine Holman’s lifeparassthesia, the numbness and tingling so commonly and successful labours for the improvement of the complained of ; (2) attacks of painful cramps, usually long financial conditions of the medical charities, with which our slight and nocturnal, or of great intensity and deserving readers are well acquainted, also assisted in determining the the name of angina cruris more than that of interof the in conferring upon him the chief council Association mittent claudication which Walton has applied to them ; in its power. honour and (3) paroxysms of pain with erythema and other symptoms, the arterio-sclerotic type of erythromelalgia. Dr. T. Orme Dudfield will read a paper on the Need of But the pain of angina pectoris is sui gcneris and while Sanatoria for Persons suffering from Consumption and How its association with coronary sclerosis is unquestionable it may be Supplied, at a special meeting of the council of there is some other unknown factor. Professor Osler disthe Charity Organisation Society to be held on Monday, tinguishes four groups of cases of angina pectoris in rela- Oct. 31st, at 4.30 P.M., at the Royal United Service Institution to arterio-sclerosis : 1. The neurotic, in which young tion. Mr. E. W. Brabrook, C.B., will preside and Sir persons die with all the symptoms of the disease and yet the William Broadbent will take part in the meeting. necropsy shows normal coronary arteries and neither local nor general arterial disease. Professor Osler has reported a case THE opening demonstration of the winter session of 1904-05 in a man aged 28 years who had had for years paroxysms of the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the at agonising cardiac pain and died in an attack. 2. The angina Chest, Brompton, will be given by Dr. Percy Kidd on pectoris of young men associated with syphilitic arteritis, Nov. 2nd, at 4 P.M., the subject being Some Wednesday, This form usually occurs inL aortic or coronary, or both. Points in the Prognosis and Treatment of Pneumonia. The men under the age of 35 years. There may be no generalL are free to all qualified medical practitioners and to lectures but arterio-sclerosis there is a lesion either at the root of the the practice of the hospital. aorta, or involving the sigmoid valves, or confined to the students attending coronary arteries. The attacks are relieved, and sometimes IT is announced that His Majesty the King has been cured, by iodides. The paroxysms may be the initial symptoms of aneurysm of the first portion of the arch of the pleased to appoint Dr. Bertram C. A. Windle to be President aorta. 3. The pre-senile cases, forming the great majority, of Queen’s College, Cork, in the room of Sir Rowland in which the attacks are associated with sclerosis of the; Blennerhassett, who has resigned. Dr. Windle is at present coronary arteries as part of widespread degeneration of, Dean of the Medical Faculty and Professor of Anatomy and vessels. But there is another factor, for in only a smalll Anthropology in the University of Birmingham. proportion of cases of sclerosis of the coronary arteries does angina pectoris occur. 4. The senile group. After’ A CONFERENCE arranged by the Sanitary Institute and 70 years of age angina pectoris is not infrequent, the King Alfred School Society will be held on Friday, being a sort of terminal event in the cardio-vascular: Nov. llth, in the Parkes Museum, Margaret-street, London, W., to discuss Recent Educational Developments, with degeneration. ____

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special of the

reference to the

new Education Code and the report Commission. Moseley

THE Bowman Lecture of the Ophthalmological Society will be delivered on Thursday, Nov. 3rd, at 9 P.M., by Dr. F. W. Mott, in the rooms of the Medical Society of London, 11, Chandos-street, Cavendish-square, W., the subject being the Visual Cortex. All members of the medical profession are invited to attend. ____

THE council of the University of Leeds has appointed Professor A. G. Barrs as its representative upon the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom. -

His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to confer the title "Royal"upon the Sanitary Institute and to signify his pleasure that the institute should be known as the Royal Sanitary Institute.

THE EVOLUTION OF MAN’S DIET. BY HARRY CAMPBELL, M.D., F.R.C.P. LOND., PHYSICIAN TO THE NORTH-WEST LONDON HOSPITAL AND TO THE HOSPITAL FOR NERVOUS DISEASES, WELBECK-STREET.

Vi.1 THE PRE-CIBICULTURAL-COCTURAL PERIOD. The discovery of fire.-When we speak of the Idiscovery of fire"it must be understood that we do not mean man’s first acquaintance with this element, but rather the discovery of how to produce it artificially, or-what is by no means the same thing-of how to turn it to practical account. Whether he had already learnt how to produce fire himself when he first began to utilise it, or whether he depended for it upon natural sources, it is impossible to say. The latter supposition is perhaps the more probable : for man must have known the fire of nature from the very dawn of his being. When was there a time when the earth was without fireIn the warm regions of his cradleland he must often have witnessed the forest or prairie fire kindled by sun or lightning ; or again he must have seen the flames flashing forth from the dread volcano and the burning streams of lava scattering fiery ruin in their path. It was not, however, till a comparatively late period of his evolution that he learned to turn this potent element to practical account. When that was, or for what purpose he first employed it, we Inasmuch as flint implements, artificially cannot say. fractured by fire - after the method adopted by the Australians and Andamanese-have been found in the miocene strata of Thenay2 Mortillet concludes that fire was utilised by our homo-simian precursors, though I for my part should unhesitatingly confer the dignity of manhood upon those of our ancestors who first bent this mighty element to their own uses. Be this at it may, the discovery of these fire-split flints seems to show that fire has been used and controlled from a very early period. The antiq1âty of cookery.-The fact that fire has been so long utilised is a sufficient proof of the great antiquity of cookery, for there can be little doubt that to cook food was one of the earliest uses to which it was put. No race of beings, whether we agree to call them men or monkeys, would be likely long to utilise fire for other purposes without discovering its remarkable effect on food, especially on the vegetable varieties, and it is certain that of the various uses to which early man may have put it none can in any way have compared in importance with its use in cookery. Analogy with the most primitive peoples now living-those in the pre-cibicultural phase of culture-bears out this view. The Esquimaux form, it is true, an exception, but they are altogether exceptionally circumstanced; fire is chiefly valued by them for lighting their oil lamps during the long 1

Nos. I., II., III.,

IV.,

and V. were

Sept. 10th (p. 781), 17th (p. 848), (p.2 1097), 1904, respectively.

24th

published in THE LANCET of

(p. 909),

Oct. 1st

(p. 967),

and 15th

See Le Préhistorique, par Gabriel et Adrian de Mortillet, third edition, Paris, 1900, p. 77 et seq.

months of winter

darkness ; for warmth they depend upon clothing rather than upon fire, and they can largely dispense with cooking, subsisting as they do almost entirely upon

animal food which stands in far less need of it than vegetable food; moreover, raw frozen meat is by no means unpalatable, and, as a matter of fact, they eat a good deal of their meat raw, from which very circumstance, indeed, they derive their name. With the other pre-cibiculturists, however, the kindling of a fire means before all things the preparation of a meal and it is used for very little else. They do not need it for light, for night is their time for rest and sleep ; nor do they greatly employ it for warmth, for though some of them, like the Fuegians, live in cold regions, they disdain even the use of clothing, and while many of the pre-cibiculturists employ fire for hardening the sticks they use for digging, this is certainly a minor use, and again what. ever may have been the case formerly do not at the present day use it for making their flint instruments. If, then, cookery was one of the earliest uses to which fire was put, and if the utilisation of fire dates from the miocene period, why, it may be asked, should the beginning of the coctural period be placed so late as the ll’5th grade ?7 I should here explain that I do not date this period from the very first employment of cookery, but from the time it had come to be practised habitually as a serious business of life and had attained to something of the dignity of an art. Not till then can it be said to have made any great difference in man’s dietary or social life. But long before this genuine coctural period, as we may call it, was reached man cooked his food in a crude and desultory fashion : the cookery as practised by present-day pre-cibiculturists, who are all in the genuine coctural period, is not a growth of yesterday but the product of a long-continued evolution. It is quite possible that this period began before the 11’5th stage. We have at present no means of knowing ; there is no evidence that the Neanderthal race, which had reached the 12th, if not the 13th, grade, cooked their food at all, but we cannot rely on such negative evidence, and in the absence of any other all we can affirm with certainty is that the period of systematic cookery must date back to a most remote

antiquity. Thus

we

find

pre-cibiculturists widely separated

from

one

another, both ethnologically and geographically, employing almost identical methods of cooking. The Australians,

Californians, Bushmen, Andamanese, and Ainus all extract principles from vegetable foods, and all employ underground ovens. These ovens, to say nothing of the means adopted for removing harmful substances, are so remarkably alike wherever they are found as to make their origin from a common source practically certain, for we assuredly cannot account for their resemblance by recourse noxious

to the

principle on which some ethnologists-and none more than Keane-rightly lay such great stress-namely, that similar customs may arise independently under similar conditions. Now, seeing that some of these peoples, to wit the Australians and American Indians, were for long ages cut off from the rest of the world, they must have brought their methods of cookery with them at that remote time when they first migrated into their respective countries, and it is at least highly probable that these methods had been in existence long anterior to this. The same conclusion is forced upon us by considering the methods adopted by primitive man for producing fire. The most finished and ingenious of these methods among primitive peoples is that of the fire-drill. We may be quite sure that this instrument was not invented until long after man had learnt to produce fire artificially, that it was in fact the outcome of a long experience in the production and utilisation of fire, and did not come into use until the genuine coctural period had been well established. Now this drill was at one time in use in widely separated parts of the world-e.g., among the Esquimaux, the ancient Mexicans, the tribes of Central America, and the Botocudos of Brazil, among the Bushmen, Kaffirs, Hottentots, and the tribes of West Africa, among the Australians and Tasmanians, and among the tribes of Western India, Alaska, and Kamso

schatka.3

How are we to explain this widespread use of the drill ?7 One may admit the possibility of its having been discovered 3 It is curious that the comparatively enlightened Polynesians, including the Maoris, should retain a more primitive method of ignition than the drill, while, on the other hand. so primitive a people as the Fuegians have for centuries past used flint and iron for that purpose.