Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/502

486 friends of a yellow-fever convalescent. But even with chile they would hesitate to tempt him with garbanzas or guisado, well knowing that the mere smell of greasy viands is often enough to bring on a relapse of the vomit. Disagreeable smells of any kind are, in fact, a potent adjuvant, if not independent cause, of a febrile diathesis. "A manufacture of artificial manure," says Professor Grainger, "formerly existed immediately opposite Christchurch workhouse, Spitalfields, which building was occupied by about four hundred children with a few adult paupers. Whenever the works were actively carried on, particularly when the wind blew in the direction of the house, there were produced numerous cases of fever, of an intractable and typhoid form. . . . The proprietor at last was compelled to close his establishment, and the children returned to their ordinary health. Five months afterward, the works were recommenced; in a day or two subsequently, the wind blowing from the manufactory, a most powerful stench pervaded the building. In the night following forty-five of the boys, whose dormitories faced the manufactory, were again seized with severe diarrhœa, while the girls, whose dormitories were in a more distant part, and faced in another direction, escaped. The manufactory having been again suppressed, there was no subsequent return of the diarrhœa" ("Report on the Hygienic Condition of the Metropolis," p. 36).

The Turkish custom-house officers fumigate their quarantine-buildings with a powerful but agreeably aromatic kind of incense-powder, which seems to serve all the purposes of disinfection, and could in many cases be substituted for the carbolic-acid libations that fill our hospitals with their scandalous odors. To the stomach of a fever patient, however, the smell of boiling fat is still more offensive, and kitchen-fumes should be carefully excluded from the sick-room.

If these precautions are adopted in time, a common remittent generally terminates with the third fit, and yellow fever takes the form of a "walking case," as the Memphis physicians call that mild type of the disease which limits its symptoms to a few shivering fits, and a night's headache, and seems, in fact, to be nothing but a modified sort of a summer ague. Every pyrexial affection is essentially an enteric disorder, a bowel-complaint, and dietetic management alone will generally insure a favorable issue of the disease. The Spanish cigar-peddlers and Spanish and Italian fruit-venders of New Orleans inhabit the vilest alleys of the "French quarter," but their frugality has saved them again and again, when their flesh-eating neighbors died by hundreds. I have known vegetarians to survive in tenements where the rooms above, below, and around them were filled with fever stricken families—decimated from week to week, dreading removal to the hospital like a sentence of death, but sticking to their flesh-pots and alcoholic "tonics." How fruit, the chief febrifuge of nature, came ever to be suspected of being the cause of pyrexial disorders,