Course of lectures on army sanitation / by C.H. Melville.

  • Melville, C. H. (Charles Henderson)
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Course of lectures on army sanitation / by C.H. Melville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/94 (page 171)
    prepared for, whilst at the same time one class of disease to which such a population is peculiarly exposed, the venereal diseases, are by national practice excluded from the purview of the sanitarian. In any case, these diseases are rarer in a mobilised army than in one on a peace footing. The next important point to note is that the diseases with which military sanitation has to deal are those only which are due to causes operating on the body from without. This is true to a greater or less extent of all sanitation, but peculiarly true as regards military sanitation, since here we start with a population certified at the outset as being free from all organic, that is, internal disease. But if there is no internal disease, then obviously all disease must come from without, be due, that is, to the interaction of the surroundings of the individual or population, on the individual or corporate economy. The definition of sanitation then as the art whereby man adapts himself to his surroundings is more true in the case of the army than of any other trade. Now we may divide all such external causes of disease into two general classes, first, those which, whilst originating outside a man’s body, always remain outside, aud second, those which originating out- side that body are nevertheless capable of entering into that body ; and which, moreover (and this is the important point) unless they do so enter in can produce no disease in the body. The former class consists of the conditions under which a man lives and works, his food, his clothing, his housing, the exertions entailed by his trade and so on, the latter class briefly of disease germs. Now, speaking merely from the point of view of the military sanitarian, we may say that disease can not be produced by any one of these causes, nor by any number of them as long as they all belong to the same class. A soldier may be hungry, ill-clad, overworked, but unless he ingests certain specific disease germs he will not on those accounts, merely, develop enteric fever or cholera. In the same way it is not necessary for a man merely to ino-est # * * • O a specific germ to contract the disease peculiar to that germ, he must at the same time have his resisting power to that germ lowered in some way before it can, so to speak, take root. Of course I am speaking on broad lines only. In individual cases a man may have a naturally low power of resistance to enteric fever or cholera and succumb to a com- paratively weak attack, but speaking of the mass of men the statement may be taken as true. It is only necessary to point to the fact that even in the severest epidemics the majority of people exposed to infection escape disease. Tuberculosis gives us another illustration. It is well known that the great majority of people of mature age who die from other causes, if their bodies be examined post mortem, show signs of having at some time or another been attacked by the tubercle bacillus, which has