Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/217

Rh "My father and my grandfather drank this water, and they lived to be old men. I have no time to bother with doctors notions."

During the last month of March there was a sudden outburst of a strange and fatal disease among the old men in the city poorhouse at Nanterre. It was accompanied by tetanoid symptoms (lockjaw), and was attributed by the physician in charge to the ergot of which he discovered traces in the very bad rye bread furnished to the inmates. The director, when asked about the reason assigned, is reported to have answered comfortably, "Doctors' humbug!"

It is the good luck of the army that an intelligent service of hygiene can be enforced whenever the authorities wish. The will began with M. de Freycinet, who was Minister of War through so many changing administrations. He set about substituting spring water or filtered water in place of the water from wells or rivers, which had previously been used by garrisons. By 1890, in comparison with 1887, the number of typhoid cases had diminished in the proportion of thirty-six per cent. By 1891 the decrease was forty-nine per cent. In the single military jurisdiction of Paris it reached seventy-five per cent. This astonishing and satisfactory change followed immediately upon the change of the water supply.

The record of the last three years only confirms this brilliant demonstration of the real work which can be accomplished by rational hygiene. There were five hundred and forty fewer cases of typhoid fever in the army posts in 1894 than in 1891, though the percentage of deaths to cases was slightly higher. But the most striking facts are found in the statistics of particular places like Paris, which has always had the reputation of being a center of this special disease.

Among the soldiers under the military government of the city there were eight hundred and twenty-four typhoid cases in 1888. The following year the number increased to eleven hundred and seventy-nine. At that time the water of the Vanne was substituted for the contaminated Seine water. The cases of the next four years numbered, respectively, only two hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred and seventy-six, two hundred and ninety-three, and two hundred and fifty-eight. Last year the Vanne itself became contaminated through an accident, the history of which has been traced conclusively. The result was an increase of typhoid cases in the Paris garrison to four hundred and thirty-six, of which three hundred and ten occurred in the three months of February, March, and April. During January and February of the present year (1895) there were only eight cases in all.

The fact that typhoid fever comes and goes with impure