Public hygiene in America : being the Centennial discourse delivered before the International Medical Congress, Philadelphia, September, 1876 / by Henry I. Bowditch ... / together with a digest of American sanitary law by Henry G. Pickering.
- Henry Ingersoll Bowditch
- Date:
- 1877
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Public hygiene in America : being the Centennial discourse delivered before the International Medical Congress, Philadelphia, September, 1876 / by Henry I. Bowditch ... / together with a digest of American sanitary law by Henry G. Pickering. 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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![Second. I have had patients in whom physical signs of an undoubted character existed, — such as crackling under the clavicle, diminished vesicular murmur, and some dulness on percussion, — who, by removal from towns and localities lying under or near the influence of dampness of the soil, to another town very dry, have experienced immense benefit. In one young lady, crackling disappeared almost wholly from the entire upper lobe of one lung, after a residence of six months in a very dry town, selected for the purpose, because the resident physician assured me that the town was very dry, and that cases of hasmoptj-sis that would, he thought, have ter- minated in fatal phthisis in a town on the coast, where he pre- vious])7 resided, got well in his actual abode. Other cases of similar character had occurred. Third. I have had another and equally significant class of cases, in which undoubted and more extensive rational and physical signs of consumption have existed for a year or more, and in whom, even now, the physical signs are sufficiently well marked, though showing less irritation of the lungs ; while the constitutional symptoms are very much better, under similar changes of residence. Finally, I stated that, to sum up the results of my experi- ence, and nrv present judgment, on this subject, as a matter of therapeutics, I dare not neglect the abundant evidence of the influence of locality; and that I deem a residence on a damp soil one of the great causes of consumption in Massachusetts. Wishing, however, to look fairly at all the evidence, pro and con, I next considered some of the IX. Apparent exceptions, taken by different physicians, to the view of the subject presented in this address. From only two had I procured statistics ; viz., Dr. Alden, of Randolph, and Dr. Benjamin E. Cotting, of Roxbury. Both of these writers stated simply the number of deaths by consumption in a place, and failed to give either the population or the whole number of deaths in the districts, alluded to as dry or moist: hence, no inferences could be justly made from them. Dr. Cotting is very earnest, however; and declares, in the fol- lowing language, his belief that from the East Indies and the West, from the isles of the ocean and those in the Mediter-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21032750_0479.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
