Climate and Health in Hot Countries and the Outlines of Tropical Climatology: A Popular Treatise on Personal Hygiene in the Hotter Parts of the World, and on the Climates That Will Be Met Within Them.Giles, George Michael James
Science
Climate and Health in Hot Countries and the Outlines of Tropical Climatology: A Popular Treatise on Personal Hygiene in the Hotter Parts of the World, and on the Climates That Will Be Met Within Them.
Giles, George Michael James
Hygiene -- Popular works; Medical climatology; Tropical medicine
Permanganate has now had a long trial in India. I have never known it
fail, wherever it has been used in the manner above described, and the
operation has been conducted _by an European officer in person_. The
native medical officer, even when trained after our European methods, is
seldom really convinced of its efficiency, and moreover he lacks the
prestige of prophets hailing from abroad, and so may be really unable to
carry out his instructions. An even commoner mistake is to go to work
piecemeal, disinfecting a few suspected wells and leaving the rest till
fresh cases spring up, as they necessarily must, as buckets infected
from the first infected wells will inevitably be taken to other wells
during the time that the former are unusable, and they can scarcely fail
to infect them, and so start new foci of infection, if sufficient time
be allowed for the germs to increase and multiply to a dangerous extent
in their new location. Reports of failure I have received in plenty, but
on investigation they have always proved to be due to some such cause as
those indicated above. It is, of course, only rarely that a layman will
find himself called upon to conduct such operations on a large scale;
but the knowledge of how to do so may be of such great public benefit to
the readers’ coloured fellow-subjects, that it is most desirable that
every European should know how to proceed, and, at any rate, I would
strongly advise my readers, should cholera appear in their
neighbourhood, never to omit the precaution of disinfecting all wells
under their own control, as it is a great protection to one’s servants
and other native attendants. It is well, too, to repeat the process
occasionally as long as the disease continues near one.
By the simple precautions as to food and drink described above, the
danger of being attacked by cholera may be reduced to a very small
contingency, even when it is raging around one, and there is no reason
whatever for the almost superstitious fear with which the disease used
to be regarded.
It remains to say a few words as to the treatment of cases should they
arise in your household in places where medical aid is unobtainable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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