The moral is obvious. Great cities are developing some sort of a
sanitary conscience. Farmers and country districts have as yet little or
none. Bad as our city water often is, and defective as our systems of
sewage, they cannot for a moment compare in deadliness with that most
unheavenly pair of twins, the shallow well and the vault privy. A more
ingenious combination for the dissemination of typhoid than this
precious couple could hardly have been devised. The innocent householder
sallies forth, and at an appropriate distance from his cot he digs two
holes, one about thirty feet deep, the other about four. Into the
shallower one he throws his excreta, while upon the surface of the
ground he flings abroad his household waste from the back stoop. The
gentle rain from heaven washes these various products down into the soil
and percolates gradually into the deeper hole. When the interesting
solution has accumulated to a sufficient depth, it is drawn up by the
old oaken bucket or modern pump, and drunk. Is it any wonder that in
this progressive and highly civilized country three hundred and fifty
thousand cases of typhoid occur every year, with a death penalty of ten
per cent? Counting half of these as workers, and the period of illness
as two months, which would be very moderate estimates, gives a loss of
productive working time equivalent to thirty thousand years. Talk of
"cheap as dirt"! It is the most expensive thing there is.
Typhoid still abundantly earns its old name of "military fever," and its
sinister victories in war are even more renowned than its daily triumphs
in peace. Strange as it may seem, the deadliest enemies of the soldier
are not bullets but bacilli, and sewage is mightier than the sword. For
instance, in the Franco-Prussian War, typhoid alone caused sixty per
cent of all the deaths. In the Boer War it caused nearly six thousand
deaths as compared with seven thousand five hundred from wounds in
battle, while other diseases caused five thousand more. In the majority
of modern campaigns, from two-thirds to five-sixths of all deaths are
due to disease and not to battle. It may be that we sanitarians will
achieve the ends of the peace congresses by an unexpected route, and
make war a healthful and comparatively harmless form of national
gymnastics. Its battle-mortality rate, for the number engaged, is not so
very far above football now!
Given the bacillus, how does it get into the human system? Here the
evidence is so abundant and overwhelming that we may content ourselves
with bald statements of fact. The three great routes of this pestilence
are water, milk, and flies. Of the three, the first is far the most
common and important. While only a rough statement is possible, probably
eighty-five per cent of all cases from water, five per cent from milk,
five per cent through flies, and five per cent through other channels,
would fairly represent the percentage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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