The
thought, of a pit or sewer filled with excremental matters mixed with
water, seething and bubbling in its dark warm atmosphere, and
communicating directly (with or without the intervention of that
treacherous machine called a trap) with a house, is enough to make one
shudder, and the long bills of mortality already chargeable to this
arrangement tell us that if we shudder we do not do so without cause. As
an instance of the way in which dangers may work in unsuspected ways, I
may mention the fact that Emmerich, in examining the soil beneath a ward
of a hospital at Amberg, discovered therein the peculiar bacillus which
causes pneumonia, and which had probably been the cause of an outbreak of
pneumonia that had occurred in that very ward.
The importance of "Dutch cleanliness" in our houses, and the abolition of
all collections of putrescible matter in and around our houses, is
abundantly evident.
It will not be without profit to examine some well-known facts, by the
aids of the additional light which has been thrown upon them by the study
of the microbes which are in the media around us.
There is no better known cause of a high death rate than overcrowding.
Overcrowding increases the death rate from infectious diseases,
especially such as whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria,
small-pox, and typhus.
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