Man Who Won the War

The man who won Italy's war with Ethiopia was last week spotted by doctors as being an Anglicized Italian, Knight Commander of the order of St. Michael and St. George, Sir Aldo Castellani, whose wife is English and whose only daughter two years ago married British High Commissioner for Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson. Italy's No. 1 enemy in Ethiopia was disease and Sir Aldo is a world-famed specialist in tropical diseases. Most of his experience he acquired as a medical officer of the British Colonial Office in Uganda and Ceylon. He was accustomed to spend half the year in London, where he was director of mycology in the School of Tropical Medicine, three months in the southern U. S. where he organized the schools of tropical medicine at Tulane and Louisiana State Universities. When Benito Mussolini summoned big, jovial Sir Aldo home to Rome in 1932 to found the Royal Institute for Tropical Diseases, it might well have warned the sharp-witted that Mussolini was interested in more than the natives of Italy's colonies. Before the Italian armies reached the hot, dank Eritrean and Somaliland lowlands, Sir Aldo was commander-in-chief of the Italian Medical Corps.

He had set up six air-conditioned hospital ships for sunstroke cases. He proceeded to inoculate every Italian to land at Massawa or Mogadiscio with the vaccine he himself had discovered in British employ for prevention of typhoid, paratyphoid and cholera. Sir Aldo shipped to East Africa tons of quinine for malaria, tons of serum tubes for tetanus, gas gangrene and snake bite, and 18,000 hospital cots. He covered suspected water holes with petroleum, fumigated camps, provided good drinking water, dotted Eritrea with hospitals and laboratories. The Italian Army fought under unprecedentedly thorough medical care.

Last winter world headlines told of Italian hospital ships unloading thousands of Italian sick in secret sick dumps on the island of Rhodes, of countless Italian crosses on the plains of Eritrea. Sir Aldo smiled. Last week, arriving in Addis Ababa, he made his health report on the Italo-Ethiopian War.

Malaria: "a few deaths." Dysentery: one epidemic in southern Somaliland, no deaths. Typhus, typhoid fever, relapsing fevers: no deaths. Beriberi and scurvy: no white cases. Cholera and plague: not one case. Chief mortality was, next to Ethiopian bullets, from sunstroke which was eliminated last November by prompt treatment of the first symptoms.

Throughout the war Dr. Castellani kept open his offices in Harley Street, London. Last November he was tried for unprofessional conduct by the British General Medical Council, speedily acquitted.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.