Professor Tyndall sent to Monday's Times a striking letter to
prove that typhoid fever is simply infectious,—the infection being propagated by some organism carried into, and multiplied in, the intestinal canal of the patient,—and that this character of the disease is not recognised in London and well-drained cities, only because the sewers really carry off the poison to some other part of the town, diffusing it by the agency of "sewer - gas," or water infused with sewer - gas. In country districts, says Professor Tyndall, where there is no efficient sewerage, it can be proved that the poison spreads only on the lines of direction taken by persons who have been in contact with infected patients ; and he illustrates this in at least one case, which is conclusive as far as that case goes, in establish- ing that the fever was carried about by persons who had been in direct contact with the disease,—the case of an outbreak in North Tawton. He shows that in many even worse-drained hamlets near, where all the other conditions were the same, but where no personal communication 'with the disease had been established, the fever never appeared during long series of years ; but wherever a patient suffering from the disease went, there there was an outbreak. Professor Tyndall's case is incomplete, however, in not showing that in this respect all out- breaks of typhoid follow the same law ; whereas so little is really known of the disease, that it is quite possible that typhoid symptoms may be in one case due to a rapidly self- propagating fungus, and in another to materially different causes. For instance, the Medical Journal of this week shows that during nine years 3,555 cases of typhoid were treated in the London Fever Hospital, in the same wards with 5,144 other patients, and that though no precautions were taken to prevent the infection, not a single case of contagion occurred. Is not that as likely to be a standard case as Professor Tyndall's ?
Previous page
