The utility and application of heat as a disinfectant / by Elisha Harris.

  • Harris, Elisha, 1824-1884
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The utility and application of heat as a disinfectant / by Elisha Harris. 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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    infecting power of dry heat in the wards of the Berlin Lying-in Hos- pital. Other means might possibly have been successfully applied to the accomplishment of the same end, but none so certainly or so eco- nomically. Thorough cleansing and natural ventilation had failed to free the wards from infection, and that is precisely what has again and again occurred in typhus, and in smallpox wards, and in apartments, houses, and ships contaminated with yellow-fever infection. It is conceded that the puerperal infection is a perfect analogue of, if it is not exactly identical with the virus or infection of typhus, erysipelas, and hospital gangrene.* Hence we may justly infer that apartments or wards which have become infected with those maladies may be as readily disinfected by heat as were the wards of the Berlin Maternity Hospital. The vast practical importance of some prompt and effectual method of disinfection from the local contamination of typhus, erysipelas, hospital gangrene, and all other febrile poisons in our hospitals, and in all apartments or places that become foci of infectious maladies, is so obvious that we cannot doubt that any such method, when shown to be practicable and safe, will be generally adopted by hospital physi- cians and sanitary officers. The frequent recurrence of hospital gangrene, typhus, erysipelas, and puerperal infections in hospitals; the fatality of their operation; and their obstinate and insidious persistence in wards and sick-rooms, are events too painfully familiar to medical men. Even in the admira- bly conducted New York Hospital, on Broadway, we have known the infection of typhus or ship fever to linger persistently for days and weeks, in the frigid temperature of winter, with all the windows and doors widely open, after complete evacuation and the most thorough scrubbing, whitewashing, and renovation. But to the proofs of the disinfecting power of an elevated temper- ature. It must be confessed that the cases that can be quoted as proofs are yet too few to afford the requisite conditions for satisfactory demonstration of the proposition we seek to establish in this paper. Yet we have a variety of facts to present, which afford very strong cumulative evidences of the universal applicability and the complete efficiency of heat for purposes of disinfection. And such is the value of these evidences and the vast importance of a practical application of such knowledge to sanitary works wherever there exist fomites or fuci of febrile infection, that the writer of this paper deems it to be his duty to present all the reliable facts he has been able to gather, and he would present them in the light in which he has viewed them, even at the risk of being thought too hasty in his deductions. Before proceeding to record the results of the direct experiments and special observations, which will tend to confirm those of ])r. Von IJusch, and establish the truth of the proposition here advanced, the results of the writer's personal observations and experience may here be inserted. During a protracted and instructive experience in the superintend- * Sco an Essay on tho Cnmes and Pro/Mif/ntinn of Puerficrnl Fe.rcr, by Prof. Joseph M. Sinitli, of Now York, iu the New York Journal of Modiciuc, Sept. 1857.
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