Sanitary progress : address of the President of Section A, Brighton Health Congress, Wednesday, December 14th, 1881 on the prevention of epidemics / by Edwin Chadwick.

  • Chadwick, Edwin, 1800-1890.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary progress : address of the President of Section A, Brighton Health Congress, Wednesday, December 14th, 1881 on the prevention of epidemics / by Edwin Chadwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Frequent bodily ab- lutions pro • tective against eiiideuiics. iLpidpmics excluded from insti- tutions in nards, uii(]er the direction of a very able and energetic lady, Mrs. Johnston. At Hastings, on the early information of the occurrence of infections disease, the health officer attends, and she follows and visits from time to time more than he can do, to see that the requirements as to the isolation and treat- ment of the patient are duly attended to by the mother or the female resident in the house as it may be. The service is given which would have been rendered, under our regulations, by a trained nurse visiting the patients at their homes instead of at the ward of a hospital. I am assured that the arrange- ment has the full efficacy we anticipate from our rule. As one example, it is stated that since it has been at work not an instance has taken place there of the breaking up of schools from the outburst of an epidemic. On the nurse's practice of the protection of herself by head-to-foot washing, I may note that two medical officers who had been through the most dire epidemics in the East stated to the Academy of Medicine that they ascribed their immunity to their careful attending to that practice. Virchow showed at the Medical Congress that Pasteur's germs must have a predisposition or a nidus. It may be that the ablution destroys them. How- ever that may be, I consider it an im])ortant topic that escaped our attention on the occurrence of the great epidemic we had to deal with. If it were to occur again, I cer- tainly would proclaim and enforce the active application of water as a preventive. I had subsequent opportunities of observing its action as a factor of sanitation. I may state that I have received accounts of it, showing its efficacy, such as this. In one orphan institution, where the death-rate was twelve in the thousand, a cleansing of the place, the removal of cesspits and foul drains, the air cleansing was effected, the death-rate was reduced to eight in a thousand; and next a cleansing of the person was effected a constant ablution with tepid water, and then a reduction by another third, or to four in a thousand, was achieved. Other experiments tend to establish the value of personal cleanliness as a preventive factor at one-thii-d. It is to be borne in mind that our immediate object is the prevention of the spread of the foul-air-diseases occurring on the lines of the ordinary epidemics, whilst Sanitary Science has now evidence of primary prevention, of the possibility of their occurrence;—as in institutions, such as well-managed district schools on the half-time principle, where the chil- dren's diseases, as they are called, are, as of primary origin, banished; where a case of typhus has not been seen for years :