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.

    362/390 (page 350)
    He imputes it to some influence produced upon the people by the rise and fall of water in the sub- soil. This rise and fall is connected, but it is as a coincidence, not as a sequence. The conditions which give rise to infantile diarrhoea are those which promote the growth of certain living organisms. Such growth takes place most rapidly at high temperatures, when evaporation is rapid, and when the underground air has an excess of C02 in its composition, together with the organisms which accompany that excess—conditions which are likely to be in association with a low water-line, conditions which are naturally followed by heavy rainfalls. The z in the equation x, y, z === infantile diarrhoea, is some living organism developed by continuous heat, by dry air, excess of C02 in that air, and some other unknown condition. This organism finds admission into the stomach with the food; sets up a fermentation, by which the nourishing power of the food is destroyed; pro- duces an irritating material, which, uniting with x, causes prostration ; and, if this be not fatal, the child is starved to death. The localities in which diarrhoea arises are the favoured haunts of cholera and enteric fever, under other meteorological states in which heat and dryness are not contingencies. Pettenkofer considers their origin to be due to local and personal considerations, and believes that quarantine is useless. The opinion as to the latter point may be right, but it does not follow upon the former. The conditions which herald