Sewer gas and its effects : extracts from the works of the leading sanitary authorities, with special reference to the construction and ventilation of water closets.

Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sewer gas and its effects : extracts from the works of the leading sanitary authorities, with special reference to the construction and ventilation of water closets. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    amount; 8,000 cubic feet of the air of a house into which sewer air had penetrated destroyed more than 20 times as much potassium permanganate as the same quantity of pure air (Angus Smith). Fungi grow rapidly in such air, and meat and milk soon taint when exposed to it. When the sewer air passes through charcoal these substances are ab- sorbed; they may be partly oxidised, as Dr. Miller found some nitric acid in the charcoal, but they also collect in the char- coal, and can be recovered (in part at any rate) from it by distillation. We must also suppose, for facts leave us no other expla- nation, that the unknown agencies which produce typhoid fever may also be present; and there can be little doubt that cholera may occasionally spread in the same way. The poison of yellow fever (as appears likely from the epidemic in Ma- drid) may also exist in sewer air. Whether small-pox, scarlet fever, &c, can own a similar channel of distribution is un- certain ; that dysentery and diarrhoea may also be caused by exhalations proceeding from a foul sewer we cannot doubt, but the precise agency is here also unknown. Air rendered impure by the Gas and Effluvia from Seioers and House Drains.—Cases of asphyxia from sulphuretted hy- drogen, sulphide of ammonium, carbonic acid, and nitrogen (or possibly rapid poisoning from organic vapours), occasionally occur both in sewers and from the opening of old cesspools. In a case at Clapham, the clearing out of a privy produced in twenty-three children violent vomiting and purging, head- ache, and great prostration, and convulsive twitchings of the muscles. Two died in twenty-four hours.—( Health of Towns Report, vol. i., p. 139.) These are instances of mephitic poisoning in an intense degree; but when men have breathed the air of a newly- opened drain in much smaller amounts, marked effects are sometimes produced; languor and loss of appetite are fol- lowed by vomiting, diarrhoea, colic, and prostration. The