The fact that the Panama Canal is to be opened shortly calls our attention to a disease that may be of more or less interest and importance to Americans in the next few years. Even before the Spanish occupation of South America a peculiar sickness was endemic over a certain inland portion of Peru. The Spaniards suffered terribly from its ravages, as have the natives since then, and the trouble is still present in this same region. At the time of the building of the Oroya Railroad through this country in 1871, the workmen were afflicted greatly with a severe fever termed Oroya fever, and from Verruga peruviana. Clinicians finally began to have the feeling that the two diseases were one and the same, though in a different type, and in 1885 a young medical student, Daniel Carrion, allowed himself to be inoculated with the blood of a patient suffering