Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/101

A few months after my transfer to this regiment I came home in a troop-ship, and there again my divergence of treatment left me utterly isolated. I was third in order of seniority on board, and was put in medical charge of the women and children. It was the last troop-ship of the season, and carried only invalids and soldiers' families. Of the latter there were about seventy, with an average of perhaps two children in each. On the day after leaving Bombay a case of measles was found on board. I took the case into hospital, and every precaution to isolate it was adopted—unavailing, however. The sixth day afterward six cases were reported. After another six days thirty more were found infected and put under treatment; and I think that every child on board passed through the disease. The only number I can now recollect is that, after discharging all convalescents, thirty-six cases were sent to Haslar Hospital on arrival at Portsmouth. There must have been from eighty to one hundred cases in all. All these I treated myself in the hospital, restricting myself to this duty at first with the idea of isolation, afterward in order to control the treatment, for which I was personally responsible. I gave no stimulants, and met every case of high temperature promptly by wet towels to the chest and abdomen, and by giving for food very dilute Swiss milk ad libitum. This treatment met with deep disapproval on the part of the mothers, who were all strangers to me, and accustomed to very different treatment. Toward the end of the voyage I found the women were not unsupported in their disapproval. They carried their complaints to the various officers commanding detachments, and thus officially to my senior, the surgeon-major in charge. Now this surgeon-major had been unlucky. He had treated only two children on board, one of them his own son. They were both dead, whereas I had lost no cases, and so, although there was a difference of opinion between us, I had not much difficulty in arranging that the treatment should be left entirely in my hands. I will summarize the result. I was the only medical officer on board who gave no alcohol. I treated personally the largest number of cases, and I alone lost no patients. Moreover, of three children who died on board, two, as I have said, were treated by the senior medical officer, and the third by my assistant. I will give particulars of this, as it is a most illustrative case. It was not a case of measles, and was treated by him in the women's quarters, and I first heard of it when he told me the child was dying. I asked him to let me try to save it, which he gladly did. I put it in hospital with my measles cases. I stopped the wine, very much to its mother's disgust, stayed with it almost an hour, feeding it with milk and water, which it took greedily, and left it fully assured it was out of danger. The child lived for a week,