Erysipelas can be fatal, especially in alcoholics, the aged, and in chronic diseases. Erysipelas is contagious, especially if the bacteria get into an abrasion in the skin. Patients having this disease sometimes grow delirious and violent, and the priest should be careful how he handles them. Disinfect the hands after anointing such a patient. Tetanus, or lockjaw, is not communicable except by inoculation. The bacillus, which was isolated by Kitasato, the Japanese bacteriologist, in 1889, is found everywhere in soil, hay dust, floors, on old nails, especially on the floors of old wooden slaughter-houses. It grows best in deep wounds {184} where it is shut off from the oxygen of the air. Hence the danger of treading upon a nail that has been lying near the ground. Beriberi, a disease observed especially among seamen, appears at times in our coast towns. It is always a very serious malady and sometimes it is rapidly fatal. The infective agent, which is not known, is not undoubtedly communicable from man to man, but it is carried from place to place, and it clings to ships and buildings; it thrives in hot, moist, crowded places. The priest should disinfect his hands after visiting a case. Anthrax, called also wool-sorter's disease and splenic fever, is a very fatal disease, and the bacillus is communicable to any one through an abrasion of the skin, through the intestines by swallowing it, or through the lungs by breathing it in in dust. Disinfect the hands and the shoes after visiting a patient. Be careful not to touch anything in his room. The bacteria that cause typhoid fever, Asiatic cholera (which has been epidemic in America) and epidemic dysentery must get on the hands, or on food, or in water, and thus reach the mouth and be swallowed before they produce these diseases. Act in cholera as in anthrax, and disinfect the hands after visiting a case of typhoid. The bubonic plague, the most fatal of all epidemic diseases, has already appeared in California and Mexico. It is caused by a specific bacillus isolated by Kitasato and Yersin in 1894. The disease is communicated by contact and it is seemingly also miasmatic.