A sanitary enquiry into the probable causes of yearly epidemics in England, as observed at Leicester / Richard Weaver.

  • Weaver, Richard.
Date:
1871
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A sanitary enquiry into the probable causes of yearly epidemics in England, as observed at Leicester / Richard Weaver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    general disinfecting or antizymotic purposes, though it may be used stronger. In all cases of zymotic disease under my care, I advise°that the patient's clothes be steeped for 12 hours in such a solution ; and in typhoid fever that a portion of the same fluid be put in the vessel which receives the excreta, and before this is disposed of, that it be mixed with more of a stronger acid solution, ako that a portion be sent down the close?soil-pipe afterwards. Hydrochloric acid, unlike nitric, has almost no action on lead in the cold. I will here digress shortly to notice a substance which is very generally recommended as a disinfectant, more especially of typhoid and choleraic excreta, namely, ferrous sulphate. Supposing you add to separate portions of healthy and enteric faecal matter a little of an aqueous solution of this salt, you would in the first instance find no change in the aspect or odour of the mixture, while the typhoid excrement would have become a dirty black and free from putrid odour. Now I apprehend it is in consequence of such alterations that the use of ferrous sulphate is advocated in disinfection. What, then, is the rationale of these phenomena ? It is this—sul- phuretted hydrogen is the chief cause of the fetor of healthy and putrid excrement; at any rate I am sure that bodies which decompose sulphuretted hydrogen can be made to deodorise such matters. But putrid enteric, and stale excrement also contain ammonia, with ammoniaco-magnesian phosphate. Now hydrogen sulphide and ferrous sulphate are only mutually decomposed in alkaline solutions; hence as healthy fasces are acid, no decomposition or deodorisation takes place when ferrous sulphate is added, whereas both ensue with typhoid and decom- posing healthy fasces, these being alkaline as already stated. (Experiment shown.) Sulphate of iron, therefore, is not a de- odoriser in every case; the medium in which it is to act must be alkaline of itself, or made so. But, moreover, the mere removal of foetid odour from putrid matter does not imply the destruction or disarming of infecting particles. I have found that ferrous sulphate retards putrefaction to a fair degree, and I think it docs so chiefly by appropriating the atmospheric oxygen that would otherwise combine with the organic matter, also by being slightly acid, and not by any caustic action. For the latter reason I should not consider a typhoid stool rendered innocuous, however black or inodorous it had been made by ferrous sulphate, until it was well drenched with a strong acid. In short, sulphate of iron is practically merely a deodoriser, and that only in alkaline solutions. The experiments with vaccine lymph also prove that to aerial