Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/17

This sufficiently explains the immunity which adults usually enjoy, and especially those who are most of the time away from home and in the open air.

Typhoid fever has long been known to be caused by sewer emanations. It is quite true that this is not its only source, but it is probable that in all large cities, where sewer-pipes are connected with the houses, sewer-gas causes more typhoid fever than all other causes combined. In the country, also, and especially in the large hotels at fashionable watering-places, examples of sickness and death from this source are alarmingly frequent.

Diphtheria must be classed among the diseases which in all probability are, in many cases, caused or conveyed by sewer-gas. The testimony upon this point is so well-nigh conclusive that many medical men accept it as an established fact. For myself, I do not entertain a doubt upon the subject; and this is the opinion of Professor Willard Parker, as expressed at the Academy.

In the report of the Michigan State Board of Health for 1881 occurs the following passage:

It is probable that the contagium of diphtheria may retain its virulence for some time, and be carried a long distance, in various substances and articles in which it may have found lodgment. Diphtheria contracted from germs carried several blocks in a sewer may perhaps be as fatal as when contracted by direct exposure to one sick with it. While it is not definitely proved that the germs of diphtheria are propagated in any substance outside the living human or animal body, it is possible that they may be found to be thus propagated.

Dr. Janeway, addressing the Academy, said:

It is hard to distinguish between sickness from sewer-gas and sickness caused by noxious disease-germs conveyed in the sewers. Small-pox may come from germs in the sewers, but no one would attribute it to sewer-gas. In regard to diphtheria, however, it is less plain. The portability of diphtheritic poison is greater than is supposed.

Scarlatina.—Professor Barker declared to the Academy that sewer-gas malaria had often, in his experience, been found to complicate scarlatina, and render fatal an attack which might otherwise have ended in recovery.

Dr. Alfred Carpenter, of London, a well-known physician and sanitarian, has in a paper of considerable length, published in "The Sanitary Record," London, for March 15, 1882, related many examples in which scarlatina was propagated, perpetuated, and intensified by sewer-gas; the result of his careful observations being that in many cases, in order to render the scarlatinous germs which came through the sewers capable of successful inoculation, the patients need to have been exposed for some time to the debilitating influences of the sewer-gas; in other words, as he affirms, a suitable soil must have been created in these persons. In a letter addressed to me, dated Duppas