Drinking-water and ice supplies and their relations to health and disease / by T. Mitchell Prudden.

  • Prudden, T. Mitchell (Theophil Mitchell), 1849-1924.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drinking-water and ice supplies and their relations to health and disease / by T. Mitchell Prudden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    The responses which one commonly meets when he has occasion to point out the possi- bility of danger from the use of impure ice are apt to be : How horrid. Why do you add another misery to life ? or, Our fathers have never suffered from the use of ice, and why should we? etc. No sanitary danger has ever been pointed out, and no improvement insti- tuted, which had not to stem just such opposi- tion. The cesspool has given way to the sewer, and the town-well to the distant water supply, in the face of the same sort of silly protest on the part of many of those whose own most vital interests were at stake—persons who ignore the fact that an ever-increasing vigilance is necessary to ward off the dangers which the aggregation of large numbers of people in cities invariably entails. The danger from the use of impure ice in New York, though widespread, is not very alarming, so far as the liability to extensive outbreaks of typhoid-fever are concerned, because most of the ice which is furnished appears to be of fair quality. But if the risk of an attack of the disease can be warded off