Grandmother Did Know Something

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 8, 1909

Grandmother Did Know Something

A GENERATION ago it was somewhat common to burn sugar in sick-rooms as a disinfectant, or “to kill bad smells.” The doctors generally regarded the practise as useless but harmless, but encouraged the use of other substances.

Lately it has been shown, in a report from Professor Trilbert, of the Pasteur Institute of Paris, that burning sugar develops formic acetylene-hydrogen, one of the most powerful antiseptic gases known. Five grams of sugar (77.16 grains) were burned under a bell glass, holding ten quarts. After the vapor had cooled, bacilli of typhus, tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, etc., were placed in the bell in open glass tubes, and within half an hour all the microbes were dead.

Some of the grandmothers’ remedies seem to be coming back again. Perhaps some of the higher critics, after a lapse of years and plenty of hard thinking, as Browning says, may come, after all, to believe again in the Bible their grandmothers knew.—The Christian.