Hints on drains, traps, closets, sewer gas, and sewage disposal / by P. Hinckes Bird.

  • Bird, P. Hinckes (Peter Hinckes), 1827-1891.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hints on drains, traps, closets, sewer gas, and sewage disposal / by P. Hinckes Bird. 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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    tion between the house and the sewer, soil pipes of water-closets, as well as waste pipes of sinks, baths, &c., shoixld be completely disconnected with the sewer. With regard to the effects of sewer poison, its virulence is found to depend in some measure on the age, condition, habits, and employments of those exposed to it, and also upon the fresh- ness of their exposure. Many facts tend to prove that an atmosphere may be tolerated in working hours which would produce serious disease if breathed when the system is in the non-resisting condition of sleep. In the same way when the system is robust, in active exercise, and well-nourished by abundant and suitable food, one may safely expose himself to a degree of contamination of the au' which would be thoroughly unsafe if the various organs of the body were relaxed by sleep, fatigue, or even a posture of rest. In illustration of this a number of children in a workhouse were twice attacked with severe diarrhoea from exposure to emanations from a manm-e factory, while the worlanen had good health; and at a school, twenty out of twenty-four boys were seized with violent vomit- ing, purging, prostration, and fever within three hours after exposure to foul sewage—emanations arising from a sewer the emptying of which they had been watching, while none of the workmen became ill; and in a case which lately came under my notice, a gentleman staying at a hotel had a most serious illness, with the above symptoms, from a cesspool being emptied under his open window in the night while he was asleep. It is undoubtedly the same with regard to sewage emanations in and near our dweUings. The strong, the active, the well, and those who spend a large time of the day away from their houses do not ordinarily suffer. In the 1853 epidemic of typhoid fever at Croydon, caused by sewer-gases in the houses, we found servants chiefly attacked, and then children ; the fathers were very seldom sick at aU, because they were not much at home, while the others were usually at home.—Evidence of Dr. W. Sunderland. It is, then, from long-continued exposiu-e or when some depression of the vital powers exists, that disease is caused by a sewer-poisoned atmosphere, unless the poison be very con- centrated. When emanations from a sewer or cesspool enter a house, phenomena of disease, much more decided and acute than those described in the last section, are apt to be presented amongst the inmates. The researches of the late Dr. Herbert Barker, in which I had an opportunity of takmg part, have taught the nature and quality of ordinary cesspool and sewer air, and the effect of such air on animal life. They have sho^^^l that cess- pool emanations, when they are steadily inhaled, are poisonous ; the symptoms of disease induced being those of intestinal