In the middle and latter part of
the century a remarkable group of men, Southwood Smith, Chadwick, Budd,
Murchison, Simon, Acland, Buchanan, J.W. Russell and Benjamin Ward
Richardson, put practical sanitation on a scientific basis. Even
before the full demonstration of the germ theory, they had grasped the
conception that the battle had to be fought against a living contagion
which found in poverty, filth and wretched homes the conditions for its
existence. One terrible disease was practically wiped out in twenty-five
years of hard work. It is difficult to realize that within the memory of
men now living, typhus fever was one of the great scourges of our large
cities, and broke out in terrible epidemics--the most fatal of all to
the medical profession. In the severe epidemic in Ireland in the forties
of the last century, one fifth of all the doctors in the island died
of typhus. A better idea of the new crusade, made possible by new
knowledge, is to be had from a consideration of certain diseases against
which the fight is in active progress.
Nothing illustrates more clearly the interdependence of the sciences
than the reciprocal impulse given to new researches in pathology
and entomology by the discovery of the part played by insects in the
transmission of disease.
Pages:
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293