On an Outbreak of Relapsing Fever in Turkey in 1918

at long intervals by ranges of mountains? pimpled with extraordinary regularity by small roughly conical hills, some 100-200 feet high, called ' Tels.' This plain is watered by occasional streams and for two or three months in the spring is covered with a green herbage, which the advent of the 'hot weather about May changes to a brown dust. Towards the west this plain is populated by settled inhabitants who live in numerous villages, but to the east is uncultivated and inhabited only by wandering Bedouin tribes. In this eastern part is a Tel called by the Bedouins who used to camp about there in the spring of each year ' Tel Hadi,' and this was the spot chosen for the headquarters of one of the sections of the Baghdad Railway construction, when it was decided, during the war, to continue building this railway from Nisibin to Mosul. The Baghdad Railway was being constructed before the war by a German engineering firm, and this construction was continued during the war, for the Turkish government, by German engineers, mostly working with prisoner-of-war labour. Construction was commenced simultaneously at various points along the route, and the whole of the line under construction was divided for administrative purposes into sections. Construction in the Tel Hadi section wias begun at the end of 1917, the rail-head then being at Tel Helif, three days' journey to the west. In April 1918, when the outbreak of relapsing fever began, the section consisted of a permanent headquarters and various camps of workers which changed their position as the work progressed. The workers mostly lived in tents, and those generally black Bedouin ones. The German engineers, and a few of the more important employees, had houses of stone and mud. There should have been a German doctor in medical charge of the section, but the one who was sent