The Serum Diagnosis of Enteric Fever

It is now a year since Sheridan Del?pine brought the serum test for enteric fever prominently before the profession in this country. Since the publication of his admirable paper in the Lancet a large amount of evidence has accumulated in favour of the accuracy of this new method of making a diagnosis, which has always been admitted to be of considerable difficulty. It is not my intention in this paper to recapitulate the history of the discovery and evolution of this test. That has been made familiar to most of us by the various papers which have from time to time appeared in the British medical journals, notably by those of Wright and Semple, Fison, and Delepine. It will be sufficient to remark that the honour of first publishing this discovery undoubtedly rests with Widal of Paris, although Griinbaum, working independently, appears to have reached the same conclusions at least as soon as the French observer.