The prevention of epidemics : and the construction and management of isolation hospitals / by Roger McNeill, M.D. Edin.

  • McNeill, Roger.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention of epidemics : and the construction and management of isolation hospitals / by Roger McNeill, M.D. Edin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    it was again introduced into the family. There was no W.C. attached to this house. It was without any sewers or drains. The water supply was pure. The walls were damp and mildewed. The floor in one apartment consisted of mud, in another, of damp, rotting boards. The ground against the back wall was considerably above the level of the floor. The walls were built of rough unhewn stones, and the rain water trickled down the outside from the thatched roof. The soil about the house was more or less saturated with organic matter, animal and vegetable. I know of two other houses where typhoid fever broke out more than once, under almost similar circumstances. Dr. Maxwell Ross, county medical officer for Dumfriesshire, in his first Annual Report, states: There wrere two cases [of typhoid fever] in St. Mungo, one of them in a house in which the germs of fever seemed to have lurked for years, it having become one of the plague spots of the county. It will thus be seen that the facts proved by bacteriologists regarding the ability of the organisms of infectious disease to live outside the human body and to retain their pathogenic power, exactly agree with the experience of observers who noted the behaviour of epidemic disease. There appears to be some evidence in favour of the conclusion, that the organism or agent of infection, in the case of some diseases, is less capable of retaining its vitality or power of infection outside
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