Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/446

430 A case, which, some time ago, was tried in the Court of Queen's Bench, illustrates, in a striking manner, some of the dangers that belong to the annual national migration to the sea-side, and also suggests some very large and important considerations affecting the national health. Without going fully into the details of a peculiarly painful case, it will be sufficient to mention the salient facts. Sea-air having been ordered for a child by a medical man after an attack of scarlatina, a lady took her nurse, governess, and children, to the coast, and hired apartments without telling the lodging-house keeper of the nature of the illness in her family. After a time this most infectious of all infectious diseases broke out afresh, apparently from the neglect of the proper disinfecting processes, and the poor lady lost two of her children, and the unhappy landlady of the lodging-house also lost two little ones. The anguish of parental grief cannot be measured by a pecuniary standard, but actual medical and funeral expenses, and the injury done to the course of business, are susceptible of being assessed, and the jury gave the lodging-house keeper substantial damages. It is impossible not to feel commiseration for the sea-side visitors who experienced this blow in addition to their own calamities, but the verdict was not unwarranted by the facts, nor, to use regretfully a harsh word, undeserved. Those who are acquainted with the history of special classes among the poor are aware how much deadly illness there has been at times in the families of laundresses and pawnbrokers, who have had under their charge the raiment of fever-patients, to which no purifying process had been applied. (Still greater mischief has been done by milk which has been adulterated with water taken from some impure source.) We know, also, of cases where lodgings or furnished houses have been let, in the holiday season of the year, after the occurrence of contagious illness, and yet no disinfectants have been used, and no honest warning has been given. It must increasingly be felt how necessary are some caution and judgment in making holiday arrangements. It is comparatively easy for a lodging-house keeper to recover damages from a well-to-do family in a case where fever has been propagated through a want of care and candor; but, if the converse case had occurred—and it happens in at least an equal degree—it is hardly likely that substantial damages could be obtained from the landlord, even if bereaved fathers, in their grief, should be inclined to seek them. Scarlet fever slays in this country annually some twenty thousand people, and disables, more or less, for a longer or shorter time, a hundred thousand more. Yet, humanly speaking, the larger amount of this mortality might be averted by the processes of disinfection, separation, and, we may add, a religious adherence to truth.

It is not pleasant to think of the successive steps in the history of the sad case to which we have alluded, yet they illustrate the dangers of the travelling public, and might explain the apparently mysterious origin of many a similar attack. The mischief arose with a