Preventive medicine to the public health / by Alfred Carpenter.

  • Carpenter, Alfred.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Preventive medicine to the public health / by Alfred Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    353/390 (page 341)
    the blood contained nothing foreign to a healthy and natural state. If this be so, a question arises as from whence these impurities proceed, and how their effects are to be guarded against. I venture to put forth an hypothesis for considera- tion, which will explain much which is difficult to understand on any other view. Some impurities must exist; they are the used-up matter, the result of the act of life, or they may be inherited tendencies, which have resulted from former neglect of sanitary law, and which have depre- ciated the quality of the stock, and rendered it more susceptible to bad influences. The im- purities naturally increase if there are any defects in the sanitary arrangement of the indi- vidual corpus. Their presence is of no moment if they are not in excess, and if they are removed from the body as fast as they are formed, or in the course which they naturally follow. Let us represent them by x, in an equation in which the factors x, y, z (as a total) represent any form of epidemic disease. The problem is to assess the value of each factor in the equation. Divide the factors into two parts: centric elements, or those which are proper to the body; and excentric, or those which act upon it from without. Let x = u and e; u being the used-up material, the formed material of Beale, always in the act of formation, it is not foreign matter, and is not in ordinary proportions injurious to life. It is always being diminished as