State preventive medicine : the first annual address to the State Board of Health of Connecticut / by John S. Butler, President of the Board.

  • Butler, John Simpkins, 1803-1890.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: State preventive medicine : the first annual address to the State Board of Health of Connecticut / by John S. Butler, President of the Board. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    tutions, to 3 in 1,000, or one-third of the death-rate prevalent among the general population of the same ages, while fully one-half of the diseases of the pulmonary organs in the general population may be prevented by public sanitation. Mr. Chadwick also enu- merates many other points of gain and advancement. The result of these national reforms is an equal advance in the material, financial, physical, and moral power of the whole king- dom; a striking illustration of the correctness of the accepted axiom that the health of the people is the first object of good government. We have thus dwelt upon what has been accomplished in Eng- land, because the admirable reports of the British Parliament are unrivalled in their thoroughness and fullness of detail, as well as soundness of conclusion, and are our best instructors and guides. But sanitary reform embraces a wider field; it has availed itself of the researches of science to teach us the quantities and the qualities of air demanded by the best sanitary conditions ; its impurities, their sources, and the means of their detection and avoidance, as in proper heating and ventilation, and the intimate relation of these deficiencies and deteriorations to various diseases, especially in the necessities of tenement-houses, prisons, mines, schools, the rooms of the sick and the poor, the workshops of the various trades, and all places where any impediment exists to the free circulation of pure and dry air, as in rooms occupied by many, or by laboring or diseased persons. As an illustration of these positions, Dr. Carpenter has shown that the fatality in the well-known Black Hole in Calcutta, in the prisons in which the Austrians were confined after the battle of Austerlitz, and in other well-known instances, was not caused, as has been generally supposed, by the excessive generation of car- bonic acid gas, but by the poisonous agency of the organic matter always found in air rendered fetid by the prolonged respi- ration and cutaneous- exhalations of a crowd of human beings, and by the deficiency of the oxidation, and the consequent increase of putrescent matter in the body. It has been shown that con- sumption often has its origin not only from continuous exposure to dampness of the air, but also from air rendered impure by other, even healthy, persons occupying the same close or unventilated room, or, what is still more dangerous, sleeping in the same bed or bedroom with a consumptive patient; for it is admitted that the air of a close and crowded room may be as effectually poisoned by