Thermal ventilation, and other sanitary improvements, applicable to public buildings, and recently adopted at the New York Hospital : a discourse, delivered at the hospital, February 8th, 1851 / by John Watson.

  • Watson, John, 1807-1863.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thermal ventilation, and other sanitary improvements, applicable to public buildings, and recently adopted at the New York Hospital : a discourse, delivered at the hospital, February 8th, 1851 / by John Watson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    minutes, and while thus passing is continually exposed to vitiation from any deleterious agents that happen to be retained in them, and we have some data from which to estimate the agencies continually at work for the propagation of typhus, and scrobutus, and purulent cachexia, and dysentery, and gangrene—not to speak of other innumerable, nameless, but not unknown peculi- arities of diseased action, which render the treatment of hospital patients so difficult, their vital force so languid, and their chances of recovery from disease, which, un- der more favorable circumstances, would be looked for as a matter of course, so deceptive and precarious. Like breeds like, is a law in pathology as well as in animated nature—a law recognizable in all the vegeta- tive processes taking place within the body, and at least sometimes also out of it: for, though the fact is often overlooked, it is, nevertheless, an important truth, that all the changes occurring in what is usually called effete matter, are not in strict subservience to the simple laws of inorganic chemistry. The twin-bearing mother and twin-bearing daughter; the hereditary peculiarity of race and stock, down to the minutest family trait, idiosyncracy or propensity ; the spread and propagation of diseased actions, univer- sally acknowledged to be communicable from individual to individual, are, perhaps, not more in strict subser- vience to this law than certain changes continually tak- ing place among the molecules of effete matter, as well while retained within the body as after their elimination. The class of diseases to which this law of propaga- tion is universally admitted to apply, is comparatively small. In the philosophical study of Pathology, ten- dencies in subservience to it in other classes of diseases,