Health and healthy homes : a guide to domestic hygiene / With notes and additions by J. G. Richardson.

  • Wilson, George.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health and healthy homes : a guide to domestic hygiene / With notes and additions by J. G. Richardson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    the term zymotic is applied to those diseases which are believed to be propagated by infective germs which develop as ferments in the body of the person infected, and give rise to all the symptoms of the special disease. The term is derived from a Greek word zume, signifying a ferment, and the theory is that these germs or parti- cles, although they are too minute to be detected by the most powerful microscope, bear a strong analogy to the cells of the yeast plant, which are capable of being trans- mitted from one tumbler of saccharine substance to another, and of growing and multiplying in that sub- stance. It is true that all this is mere hypothesis; but we do find practically that many diseases are propagated very much in this way. The contagion of small-pox, for example, has often been wafted from one side of a street to another, and both it and scarlet fever are frequently spread by articles of clothing which have been infected by tainted air in one house, and conveyed, it may be, long distances, to some other, in the ordinary intercourse of life.* The infant mortality rate is usually measured by the proportion of deaths of infants under one year to births registered, and is also expressed as so many per 1000, or it may be expressed as a percentage of the total number of deaths. The mean annual death-rate for the whole of England and Wales during the ten years 1861-70 was 22.4 per 1000; but it need hardly be said that it varied very con- siderably in different localities. Thus, in fifty-four regis- tration districts the mortality was at the rate of only 17 per 1000, and in a few it was as low as 15. In another series of districts it was 19, and gradually increasing pretty much according to density of population, to 22 and 25, it reached in Manchester a rate of 32.5, and in Liver- * See editor's lecture on The Germ Theory of Disease and its present Bearing upon Public and Personal Hygiene. Perm Monthly for Nov., 1878.—(R.)