ate in screened tents were less liable to typhoid than those whose mess tents were open to the flies. The finding of the Board was explicit and convincing — "Flies swarmed over infected matter in the pits and then visited and fed upon the food prepared for the soldiers in the mess tents." 17[1]
The Reed-Vaughan-Shakespeare report takes on an even greater importance when the conditions existing in the camps in 1898, constituting the background into which the report was projected, are considered. Camp sanitation was still virtually an unknown subject to most line officers and men and, for that matter, was not well known even to many medical officers. Medical officers, moreover, lacked authority and could do little more than recommend.
In some instances, the recommendations were vigorous, as in the case of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Infantry, in camp at Jacksonville. "As we were instructed to do," writes Dean Vaughan, "we found our way to the colonel's tent and asked him to join us in the inspection of his regiment. I can only say that we found the sanitary conditions no better than in other regiments. When we were through with the inspection Major Reed said to the colonel: 'Shakespeare and Vaughan are on this commission because they know something of camp sanitation. I am here because I can damn a colonel,' and he proceeded in plain terms to speak of the responsibility of a commanding officer in looking after the health of his troops." The colonel of the Third Nebraska was William Jennings Bryan. 18[2]
The prevailing state of knowledge, or the lack thereof, is summed up by Col.P.M.Ashbum:
There was ignorance of the epidemiology of typhoid, that it was conveyed in other ways than by polluted water, ignorance of sanitation in general and of camp sanitation in particular, ignorance of proper precautions to be taken in the preparation and handling of food, ignorance of the danger of having sick men in kitchens, ignorance of the accurate methods of diagnosis which are now employed as routine in camps and hospitals, ignorance of the existence of typhoid carriers. For this ignorance no one person was to blame, it was the characteristic of the day. 19[3]
Most of this prevailing ignorance the Typhoid Report dispelled, even though it did not suspect the existence of the carrier who is not himself at the moment a victim of typhoid, and did not bring out sharply the danger of infection from the convalescent or recovered typhoid patient.
