Leslie to give us a little talk on a recent
discovery in the field of typhoid fever--you understand,
Commissioner, what I mean, I believe?"
"Perfectly. Shall I mention names?"
"No, not yet."
"Well," began Dr. Leslie, clearing his throat, "within the past
year or two we have made a most weird and startling discovery in
typhoid fever. We have found what we now call 'typhoid
carriers'--persons who do not have the disease themselves,
perhaps never have had it, but who are literally living
test-tubes of the typhoid bacillus. It is positively uncanny.
Everywhere they go they scatter the disease. Down at the
department we have the records of a number of such instances, and
our men in the research laboratories have come to the conclusion
that, far from being of rare occurrence, these cases are
comparatively common. I have in mind one particular case of a
servant girl, who, during the past five or six years, has been
employed in several families.
"In every family typhoid fever has later broken out. Experts have
traced out at least thirty, cases and several deaths due to this
one person. In another case we found an epidemic up in Harlem to
be due to a typhoid carrier on a remote farm in Connecticut. This
carrier, innocently enough, it is true, contaminated the
milk-supply coming from that farm.
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