p. 154 | KISSING | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 8, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 10.

KISSING.

ATTENTION was called lately to the danger that may lurk in a kiss, as shown by the illness that followed "kissing the bride." A month ago the wedding took place, and the following item from an exchange gives the sequel:—

JAMESTOWN, N. Y., September 13. Ransom Bratt, aged thirty-five years, died of diphtheria at his home in Kiantone, N. Y., yesterday. The Bratt family, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Bratt and their nine-year-old daughter, attended a wedding in the town of Kiantone less than a month ago. The bride had a sore throat at the time, which developed into diphtheria, and many cases of the disease broke out among those who attended the wedding and kissed the bride. The Bratt girl died two weeks ago. Immediately afterward Mrs. Bratt died, and yesterday Mr. Bratt died. The others who were attacked by the disease recovered.

That there are unaccountable outbreaks of this disease no experienced person will deny, but no up-to-the-time physician can be persuaded that an attack comes on de novo, any more than he will believe that a stalk of corn that he finds in his garden came up without a kernel being dropped in the soil. As Dr. Irving A. Watson, the accomplished secretary of the New Hampshire Board of Health, says:—

When the pollen of the pine forests of Michigan and the Northwest is carried in the air and showered down in New Hampshire, who shall say that the germ of some disease which is many times smaller than the spore of the pine may not in a warm and humid atmosphere be carried to greater distances and there produce disease? Who can say that epidemics, which are sometimes so sudden and widespread as to convince many that they are dependent on some "occult constitution" of the air, are not in a manner sown broadcast? Facts may be a danger than flights of fancy and yet follow a fixed and definite law.

If the indiscriminate and almost universal practice of kissing could be restricted to those cases in which it is an expression of sincere affection, the world would be the gainer in more ways than one.

The recent case of diphtheria conveyed by "kissing the bride" is matched by another instance of infection by kissing, that comes from Ohio:—

Scarlet fever contracted by a kiss is the latest freak in infectious diseases. A report of this peculiar case is given in a letter received recently by Secretary Probst, of the State Board of Health, from Mifflin, Ashland County, O. The letter states that a lady recently came to the village from Mansfield, O., accompanied by a child suffering from a slight attack of scarlet fever. They called on a friend, and the scarlet fever patient was permitted to kiss three children in the family where the visit was made. Within a week the three children were stricken with the disease, and their father and mother have since fallen victims to the contagion.

Miller, the Berlin savant, was the first scientist to call attention to the danger from this source, and he sets forth his reasons in a paper in the Journal of Laryngology upon "The Human Mouth as a Focus of Infection."

He enumerates, as diseases traced to the oral bacteria, dental caries, and its consequences, pneumonia fever, tonsillitis, angina ludovici, pneumococcus, abscesses, actinomycosis, noma, thrush, and other oral infections, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and the human form of stomatitis epidemica, or foot or mouth disease. He gives a list of oral bacteria that have been cultivated, numbering twenty-two varieties, besides numerous other pathogenic microorganisms that have been found in the mouth, but have not been as yet cultivated in artificial media.—The Independent.