Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/67

Rh organic matter, and therefore favor a state of atmospheric purity; but carbolic acid is not a deodorizer. It makes, but it does not absorb or destroy, fetid vapors: and it is for this reason that M. Lemaire and others have recommended the use of carbolic acid in conjunction with sulphate of zinc, salts of iron, chloride of lime, and so on.

There is indisputable similarity between the working of putrid germs and of the seeds of the most virulent plagues. Fevers were classed of old as putrid diseases, and any one who has witnessed the prompt decomposition and the foul emanations of fever stricken beings, whether human or brute, can readily understand that it was no very India rubber like stretch of the imagination that led our forefathers to confound contagion with putrescence.

It is, however, necessary to learn that, in practising Disinfection, we have to neutralize the products of, or check the decay of healthy matter separated from living plants or animals, and that we have likewise to destroy specific elements of contagion, elements which differ in the various maladies that are known to be transmissible from the sick to the healthy. In order to illustrate this, let us take the case of sewage. The excreta of healthy human beings decompose, and the sewer gases belong to the class of irrespirable gases which cannot be absorbed into the system without producing serious ill effects, and even symptoms such as characterize a putrid fever—vomiting—faintness followed by prolonged stupor—fetid diarrhœa, and even death. The results are apparently undistinguishable from typhus fever. The line of demarcation, between a malignant fever produced under such circumstances and fevers due to a specific virus, has not yet been satisfactorily established.

The foregoing symptoms result also from decomposing matters passing into the blood otherwise than by the lungs, and whole hecatombs of slain, through the instrumentality of hospital gangrene, pyæmia, puerperal fever, and allied diseases, testify to the great dangers arising from the diffusion of solid or fluid matters in a state of decomposition. In dealing with the excreta of the sick, it is not the volatile elements and simple gases that we have to fear, but the materials that adhere to any thing and every thing on and around the sick, and, if ever we allow them to pass from the sick room, it is quite impossible to control them. If we even let them pass in any quantity from room to room or house to house in atmospheric currents, we cannot trace them until they have victimized fresh subjects susceptible to their pernicious influences.

For our purpose it may be accepted as proved that successful disinfection must aim at preventing decomposition in simple putrescible matters, or must aim at attacking fever germs as soon as discharged by the patient. It is desirable that a disinfectant should be an antiseptic—viz., an agent that arrests chemical change in animal or vegetable matters, and it must be a deodorizer, or capable of fixing the most noxious gases evolved. It has been erroneously believed that