Water supply : considered mainly from a chemical and sanitary standpoint / by Wm. Ripley Nichols.

  • Nichols, Wm. Ripley (William Ripley), 1847-1886.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Water supply : considered mainly from a chemical and sanitary standpoint / by Wm. Ripley Nichols. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    been with the greatest unanimity, ascribed to the use of impure drinking water are typhoid fever and cholera. With reference even to these diseases, however, there has been much discussion and controversy between the adherents and the opponents of the drinking-water theory since 1848, when Snow, Budd, and others in England ascribed the spread of the cholera then prev- alent to the drinking of water fouled by the dejections of cholera patients. It would be unprofitable, in brief space, to attempt to review the numerous cases on record where the coincidences between impure water and cholera (and other diseases) have been so marked as to lead able and careful investigators to believe in the existence of cause and effect. The most able opponent of the theory is Professor Pettenkofer, of Munich, who holds that in these cases there is coincidence only, and that other cir- cumstances, and notably the character of the ground and the condition of ground water, have been overlooked in the investi- gations. He and his sympathizers also bring forward many instances where the connection between a particular outbreak of a specific disease and the drinking water previously used by those attacked is not only not obvious, but absolutely out of the question. . . Even the most earnest advocates of the drinking-water theory must admit that the theory is by no means proved, in the sense in which a mathematical proposition may be proved, and it cer- tainly cannot be asserted that the drinking water is the only means by which the zymotic diseases may be propagated ; the coincidences, however, if coincidences they be, are most remark- able, and every year adds to their number. To choose a single example from the multitude which are accessible, we may take the case of an outbreak of typhoid fever in North Boston Erie Co N Y which occurred in the year 1843, consequently before the connection between typhoid and drinking water had become a theory. The community consisted of nine families (forty-three persons), and typhoid fever had never been known in the vicinity until in the year named a sick traveler took lodging at the tavern and twenty-eight days thereafter died of what was pronounced by the physicians to be typhoid fever. The disease spread twen- ty-eight persons in all were attacked, and only three families es- caped These three families were the only ones which did not use the well of the tavern, two of them on account of distance, and one