abolish two-thirds of the spread of tuberculosis.
It is not necessary to isolate every consumptive in order to stop the
spread of the disease. All that is requisite is to prevent the bacilli
in his sputum from reaching the floor or the walls, to have both the
latter well lighted and aired, and, if possible, exposed to direct
sunlight at some time during the day, and to see that dust from the
floor is not raised in clouds by dry sweeping so as to be inhaled into
the lungs or settle upon food, fingers, or clothing, and that children
be not allowed to play upon such floors as may be even possibly
contaminated. These precautions, combined with the five-to-one resisting
power of the healthy human organism, will render the risk of
transmission of the disease an exceedingly small one. To what
infinitesimal proportions this risk can be reduced by intelligent and
strict sanitation is illustrated by the fact, already alluded to, of the
almost complete germ-freeness of the dust from walls and floors of
sanitorium cottages, and by the even more convincing and conclusive
practical result, that scarcely a single case is on record of the
transmission of this disease to a nurse, a physician, or a servant, or
other employee in an institution for its cure.
There is absolutely no rational basis for this panic-stricken dread of
an intelligent, cleanly consumptive, or for the cruel tendency to make
him an outcast and raise the cry of the leper against him: "Unclean!
Unclean!"
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that consumption is transmitted _by
way of the floor_; and if this relay-station be kept sterile there is
little danger of its transmission by other means.
Practically all that is needed to break this link is the absolute
suppression of what is universally and overwhelmingly regarded as not
merely an unsanitary and indecent, but a filthy, vulgar, and disgusting
habit--promiscuous expectoration. There is nothing new or unnatural in
this repression, this _tabu_ on expectoration. In fact, we are already
provided with an instinct to back it. In every race, in every age, in
every grade of civilization, the human saliva has been regarded as the
most disgusting, the most dangerous and repulsive of substances, and the
act of spitting as the last and deepest sign of contempt and hatred; and
if directed toward an individual, the deadliest and most unbearable
insult, which can be wiped out only by blood. Primitive literature and
legend are full of stories of the poisonousness of human saliva and the
deadliness of the human bite. It was the "bugs" in it that did it. It is
most interesting to see how science has finally, thousands of years
afterward, shown the substantial basis of, and gone far to justify, this
instinctive horror and loathing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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