Selections from essays on health-culture and the sanitary woolen system / by Gustav Jaeger ... (Tr. from the German.).

  • Gustav Jäger
Date:
1891
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selections from essays on health-culture and the sanitary woolen system / by Gustav Jaeger ... (Tr. from the German.). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    that intermittent fever, which is generated in marshy surfaces, makes its appearance with aug- mented frequency when the sinking of the water level lays bare more extended tracts of marshy sur- face, thus allowing the unquestionably animate germs to rise in the air. On this so-called underground-water theory of Pettenkofer's, Naegeli grafts his observations. From a series of experiments, carried on for a period of nine years, with the subordinate fungi, or germs, he is led not only to adopt, but to enforce with fresh and convincing arguments, the opinion long ago ex- pressed by other observers, that the germs of infec- tion in the above-named maladies belong to the samo group of living organisms as the familiar ferment of putrescence—that is, to the group of bacteria which are so exceedingly minute that, according to Nae- GELi, 30,000 milliards of them make up the weight of one gramme. That certain soils, such as that of Munich, are espe- cially productive of typhus, is explained by Naegeli, taking PETTE]sns:orER's views into account, in this wise: ^* The first condition of a malarious soil, breeding endemic and epidemic maladies, is underground water, lying not too far from the surface, with alternate rise and subsidence of level, resulting in alternations of wet and dry strata. When these strata become dry, the germs cling to the earth, and where the soil is light and the air follows the subsiding level of underground water, the germs pervade this under- ground atmosphere, and if there be an issue towards the surface, they will rise througli it intg the open air.
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