Proceedings of the quarter-centennial celebration of the establishment of the Michigan State Board of Health : held at Detroit, Michigan, August 9, 1898.
- Michigan. State Board of Health
- Date:
- 1898
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Proceedings of the quarter-centennial celebration of the establishment of the Michigan State Board of Health : held at Detroit, Michigan, August 9, 1898. 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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![departure; established a sanitary police of the lower ]Mississippi in time of yellow fever at any port or landing thereon; required thorough cleans- ing, disinfection ami aeration of all houses, river vessels and boats, in which there had been cases of yellow fever. To notice in detail the in- vestigations made by Drs. Chailld and ?=iternberg on fevers; Drs. Wood and Formand on diphtheria; Professors Peinsen and Smyth on the dan- gers of carbonic oxide and soil gases; Professors Mallet, Martin and Pumpelly, on the organic matter in potable water; Col. Waring and Mr. llowditcii’s re])ort on sewerage and drainage in the Fnited States; Mr. Rudolph Ilening’s report uj)on sewerage works in Europe, and many other scientitic investigations conducted under the auspices of the Board, and their practical results, would require much more space than this occasion affords. In 1875 Klebs first described the bacillus of typhoid fever, and again, with Eberth, more accurately, in 1880; in 1884 Koch demonstrated the bacillus of cholera, and Loetiler that of diphtheria; but it is needless to ])ursue this category, literature with which we are all familiar is filled with it. Equally imi)ortant to our contention is the relation of these discoveries to measures for their prevention or destruction. Hitherto the use of disinfectants had been an art only and eni])yrical. Certainty of their utility awaited their application to disease germs as a test of their efficiency, and thus disinfection has become a scientific procedure. Steam had been used to a limited extent and had won the confidence of all who used it by its recogni/.ed result as an efficient disinfectant, for many years, but it was not until 1884, when Dr. Sternberg reported that by actual experiment it was fatal to all of the i)athogenic and non- pathogenic organisms tested, in the absence of spores (with the single exception of sarcina lutea), at a temperature of 14o.(*)°, which placed its use on a scientific basis, tliat it has since that time been generally ac- cepted. Nevertheless, the first ship disinfection undertaken on a strictly scientific basis was with mercuric bichloride, i!i virtue of its known germicidal ])roperties, by Dr. Joseph Holt in the same year that Dr. Sternberg declared the- efficiency of steam. Two years afterward, how- ever, Dr. Holt “became fully convinced of the entire sufficiency of the moist high temperature, as in itself a ])otential agent of the most de- cisive kind.”* And the use of steam has since become one of the most efficient agents in sanitary work in the destruction of disease germs. Antitoxins were the outcome of sanitary work by Salmon and Smith in 188(), who showed that the products of active or virulent bacilli were caj)able of inducing very severe symptoms or septic poisoning, so t^e products of attenuated bacilli, if injected into an animal, confers a degree of protection against the actions of virulent bacilli almost, if not quite, as great as that obtained when the attenuated bacilli are themselves in- jected. This discovery, together with Sewall’s observations on the im- munity ])roduced by gradually increasing doses of cobra poison, and the observations of Von Fodor and Nuttall on the bacterial action of blood and blood serum, o])ened up the way foi* the ])roduction of antitoxin serum by Behring, Kitasato, Ogata and others in 18Sl)-!)0, and the anti- toxin treatment of diphtheria and tetanus, which began in 1891 and has been the means of i)rolonging many thousands of lives. Efforts for the protection and ])ui-itication of water sup])lies seem to have awaited conditions somewhat analogous to the use of disinfectants ♦Sanitarian Vol, XVII, p. 331.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22335213_0035.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
