The hygiene of air and water : being a popular account of the effects of the impurities of air and water, their detection, and the modes of remedying them / by William Procter.

  • Procter, William.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hygiene of air and water : being a popular account of the effects of the impurities of air and water, their detection, and the modes of remedying them / by William Procter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    the dwellings, and was thus the means of introducing the poisonous matter. The other instance occurred at Bramham College, near Tadcaster. In the latter part of March, 1869, nineteen boys were, at or about the same time, attacked with typhoid fever. This sudden irruption showed that there must have been a common cause in operation. The village was supplied with water from a well; the water had a pleasant taste, but, on analysis, gave evidence of sewage admixture. Adjoining the well was a soft water tank, which was cemented on the inside. On the side of it, next the well, the cement was found to be shelling off, and oozing was going on from the tank into the well; and it was, moreover, discovered that the tank water was contaminated with sewage matter, derived from a drain passing over the top of the tank, from a water closet, to a sewage reservoir; cracks were detected in the pipes composing it, through which the matter dropped into the tank. The introduction of the specific poison was readily explained. In February, two boys were attacked with the fever, and circumstances showed that the infection had been imbibed before their arrival at Bramham, and that in this manner, through the agency of the water, the disease had been introduced into the school. As Dr. C. Allbutt remarks, in both these cases, it is worthy of notice, that so far as enteric fever was concerned, the water had been drunk with impunity, until, with sewage matter, the fever poison passed into it. Dr. Buchanan had to investigate an outbreak of fever in a village in Essex. There were eleven wells in the