SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
(Sofia n this column does not necessarily preclude subsequent review.)
Epidemics Resulting from Wars. By Dr. F. Prinzing. (Clarendon Press. 7a 6d. net.)—The evil effects of past wars on the health of the civil population are examined in much detail in this book, which was commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It is shown that formerly the losses of the armies from wounds or disease were leas serious than the mortality from epidemics among the peoples at large. In the Thirty Years' War Bohemia and Wurt- temberg, and probably several other States, lost three-fourths of theie population. The remnants of the Grand Army returning from Prussia spread typhus throughout Central Europe, causing many thousands of deaths. The Franco-Prussian War gave rise to a very serious small- pox epidemic in Germany ; nearly two thousand French prisoners died, and in all Germany there were one hundred and seventy thousand fatal cases in the two years 1871-72. The prisoners are said to have introduced the disease, but it was doubtless aggravated by the deplorable conditions of the prison-camps, which the author does not mention ; then, as now, the Germans failed to see that in their own interests they should treat their prisoners humanely. Since 1870 medical science has made such vast strides that the masses of men now in the field have on the whole been kept free from infectious disease, except in Serbia. But the danger is always there, only to be averted by the sleepless vigilance of the medical authorities, whose work is apt to be undervalued by the unthinking because of its very success.
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