Good Health | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 24, 1879

Good Health.

Preventing Infective Diseases.

THERE are three conditions that seem necessary to give potency and death-grasp to most epidemics. There must be the specific poison. As a rule, it is just as impossible to originate small-pox from decaying organic matter as it is to cause an oak to grow in a very rich soil without the acorn. The seed being furnished, the soil has very much to do with the rankness or dwarfishness of the growth; but the seed itself is not evolved. This is the rule as to the seeds of specific diseases, and yet does not hold a strict analogy. It is probable that cholera was born one day near the Ganges, just as, not very long since, nitro-glycerine commenced to be. There are fortuitous and unfortunate combinations which originate disease. Whenever a new disease is reported, there are always those who believe there is nothing new under the sun. They trace it back to the Pyramids, to Herodotus, Hippocrates, or Galen. Nevertheless, Asiatic cholera, diphtheria, and typhoid or cess-pool fever did not exist in the days of Moses. Fortunately the accidents or combinations by which there is a spontaneous origin of any of the zymotic diseases are very rare. Drs. Budd and Von Giett deny, for instance, that typhoid fever ever occurs in this way. Others—as Murchison and Sir Wm. Jenner—believe it to be occasionally spontaneous. A disease may only find originating power at some one point in the earth, and occur at other places only by conveyance. Until within ten years scarlet fever had never occurred in India. Measles had never been in the Fiji Islands until carried there by a ship; and then it was so fatal to old and young that a large portion of the population died.

The yellow fever is thought by many to be a mongrel, born of African typhus and West India miliaria, and never to occur in this country de novo.

It may be said in general that the probability of the spontaneous origin of any infectious disease is very small, and that the views of the contagionists are well sustained. Yet that typhoid fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, etc., do occur without conveyance from person to person is quite probable. Those who hold to the chemical, instead of the germ hypothesis of disease maintain that these malicious combinations are formed just as new compounds originate in the laboratory. Those who believe in spontaneous generation think that Bacteria and other forms of microphytes arise and flourish in a similar manner. The Pandora Box theory is exploded.

The idea that epidemics are special creations of God, for specific purposes of chastisement, is also not so orthodox as formerly. He does use disease and death as punishments and warnings; but in their origin they are believed to be the results of disobedience of the laws of nature.

On this point of the origin of specific diseases the sound philosophy of the present is to seek their limitation by studying and interrupting their methods of conveyance, at the same time that we are on guard against those conditions which are most likely to cause them de novo, if such a thing is possible.

The next point is that specific poisons, whether or not originated by favoring unsanitary conditions, are surely aided in their spread and virulence thereby. The records of epidemics show that they borrow their chief momentum from close apartments, filth, or careless mingling with persons or effects that are contaminated. The question of surrounding filth may not decide in an individual case whether there will be an attack or whether not it will be virulent, since many factors are concerned in the determination; but the law of limitation and benignity is altogether in the direction of cleanliness.

After a fire gets fearful headway, fireproof blocks often fall; but it never would have spread so if in the start it had not found much combustible material. When an epidemic gets headway, it sometimes seems quite indiscriminate as to its points of attack. Those who judge from impressions and emotions, and who do not study or classify the details of clinical history, readily lose hope; but examination of a sufficient number of data and a comparison of various epidemics always decide the matter in favor of strict sanitary administration. Wisdom and economy alike require that our cities and towns be kept from pollutions, so that the foul seeds shall not germinate so freely or so luxuriantly. If these alight, it is to be expected that there will be some evil result; but hopefulness is all on the side of neatness.

The next condition of an epidemic is that it must find in individuals a susceptibility favoring its intensity. Here again is a wide field for rigid inquiry. Cholera attains its highest death-rates among the dissolute or their children, and so does yellow fever. The tenement-house victims of diphtheria and scarlet fever are far the more numerous. While it cannot be denied that these infective poisons attack all classes and are intensive in many who are of robust vigor, yet sanitary medicine is able to show that there is a law of attack and procedure. It is not an indiscriminate assault and battery. The single fact that under the old system of inoculation, a ten days’ preparation of the system so reduced the mortality of small-pox as to justify its voluntary acquirement, is a great pointer as to how far we can deal with a human system in its preparation for an epidemic. Cleanliness of the skin, care as to the food, and the various minor matters at such times often determine the question of life or death, and that of exemption from attack also.—Independent.