Progress and problems in preventive medicine.

  • Rosenau, M. J. (Milton Joseph), 1869-1946.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Progress and problems in preventive medicine. 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.

    11/36 (page 9)
    frequently people contract typhoid fever at country, moun- tain or seashore resorts. The excess of typhoid fever in the autumn now goes by the special name of vacation ty- phoid. '' The unsanitary conditions found in many sparsely settled communities temporarily occupied during the sum- mer season often challenge the conditions found in military camps during the bow and arrow age. Before people leave the sanitary security of a well-guarded city for vacation grounds, they should demand a bill of health from the health officer. Sometimes science will change our views in a revolu- tionary manner, but these altered views may not materially change the practice of our art. Thus our entire conception of ventilation has changed, owing to the fact that we now do not believe that fresh air is particularly necessary in order to furnish us with more oxygen or to remove the slight excess of carbon dioxide. It is plain that it is heat stagnation that makes us feel so uncomfortable in a poorly ventilated room rather than any change in the chemical composition of the air. It has been made perfectly clear from the work of Flugge that one of the chief functions of fresh air is to help our heat-regulat- ing mechanism maintain the normal temperature of the body. It is necessary to have some 2000 to 3000 cubic feet of air an hour to maintain our thermic equilibrium—just the amount that was formerly stated to be necessary to dilute the carbon dioxide and supply fresh oxygen. The practice of ventilation, therefore, has not altered so much as has our reason for attaching importance to clean, cool, moving air, which has completely changed. One of the fallacies that has fallen is the relation of the air to the spread of infection. The virus of most commu- nicable diseases was believed to be in the expired breath, or exhaled as emanations of some sort from the body. These emanations were said to be carried long distances,—miles— on the wind. The easiest, and therefore the most natural way, to account for the spread of epidemic diseases was to consider them as air-borne. Nowadays the sanitarian pays little heed to infection in the air except in droplet infection, and the radius of danger in the fine spray from the mouth