W. A. Osborne , M.D.
In this extraordinarily interesting talk Dr. W. A. Osborne, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Melbourne University, who is over here on holiday, will discuss the effects of disease on mankind, not only the wiping out of tens of thousands by epidemic, but the deteriorating effect by the advance of disease on leaders of men. He points out that, until the twentieth century casualties due to weapons were trifling compared with those arising from disease, especially typhus. Typhoid also decimated armies, and in the South African War took heavy toll. He will speak of malaria, which led to the defeat of a British expedition in Holland in 1809, and of scurvy which was endemic in the Middle Ages, but disappeared with the introduction of the potato. Disease in Napoleon, he says, was partly responsible for Sedan, or had a modern eye-expert attended Samuel Pepys we should have had thirty years more of his delightful diary.