THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1916. THE KAISER'S ILLNESS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16589, 12 January 1916, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1916. THE KAISER'S ILLNESS.

For some days past rumours with respect to the state of health of the Kaiser have been growing in assurance and in circumstantial detail. Apparently the report of his illness may be accepted as true. From New York comes an interesting cablegram bearing on the whole subject which states, among other things, that the German Embassy at Washington has accepted as authentic the report that the Kaiser is critically ill. There is also rumour of a summoning of German princes to Berlin, together with some anticipation of the likelihood of the German Crown Prince assuming the Imperial mantle for the time being. Whatever that may be worth, and assistance from Eerlin in clearing up such points is hardly to be expected, the world at large will find no difficulty in accepting as sufficiently authenticated the report that the health of the Emperor of Germany has badly broken down. Nor will it have much doubt concerning the nature of his illness. It seems certain, indeed, that the Kaiser is suffering, in the recurrence of a former trouble, from the malady which was fatal in the case of his father —namely, cancer in the throat. In that evept it is inevitable that the same question as excited a painful controversy over the bedside • of Frederick III —whether the operation for the extirpation of the larynx should have been performed —will have to be settled in his case also. In that controversy, will be remembered, an English surgeon, Sir Morell Mackenzie, who enjoyed <& gr©cit reputation & specialist in diseases of the throat, took a very prominent part. The German physicians who had attended the patient—then Crown Prince of Germany—had diagnosed his ailment as cancer of the throat, but Morell Mackenzie, who was specially summoned from England to attend him, held that the disease was not demonstrably cancerous —a view which he based on a microscopical examination by Virchow of a portion of the tissue —and that an operation for the removal of the larynx was, therefore, not justifiable as "the growth might be curable by other treatment. This advice, which was given in May, 1887, was followed, but in November of the same year the German doctors were again called into consultation and it was ultimately admitted that the disease really was cancer. Morell Mackenzie rather unfortunately suggested, then, that since his first examination of the patient the disease had become malignant in consequence of the irritating effect of the treatment by the German doctors. It was a few months later that the patient became Emperor of Germany, only to reign for less than four months. On the assumption that the reports that are now in circulation are trustworthy, there can be no doubt as to the outcome of the illness of the Kaiser. Probably we shall not have to wait very long for more definite news concerning a situation in which the world as a whole cannot but be deeply interested. In the meantime it is presented with a picture which, as a commentary upon the vanity of human ambitions, is more than arresting. The great war lord, the aspirant to the hegemony of Europe, the claimant to "the special favour of Heaven in his exalted mission on earth- —lie it is who, according to apparently leliable accounts, lies stricken down by one of the most terrible of diseases which medical science has_ to endeavour to combat. All his pride and arrogance, his faith in mailed fist and shining armour, will not help him in such an emergency. The Kaiser lies humbled to his real rank, that of a mere man vulnerable as any to the ills the flesh is heir to, incapable as any of purchasing im-

munity from disease; with a king's ransom. All his great armies will not help him to repel the grim antagonist with which his medical attendants will now be wrestling. What in these hours will bo the reflections of one who so long haa mapped his course on the principle, " Sic volo, sic jubeo," who shall surmise 1 For the fearful deluge of bloodshed into which Europe has been plunged the exact responsibility of the Kaiser has yet perhaps to be measured. But civilisation has its convictions on that point. And it is a cold, pitiless, and speculative interest that it will take in the illness of tho head of the House of Hohenzollern. Even the Kaiser's bitterest enemies could hardly wish him a more terrible ordeal, a more dreadful hour of agony, mental and physical, than that through which, unless the reports are strangely misleading, he must even now be passing.