Organic Impurities in Water. -- a small quantity of organic matter of vegetable origin, that is to say, an amount not exceeding three grains to the gallon, is not generally found to be injurious, but even very minute quantities of organic material of animal origin, especially if this material is composed of the waste matters, such as urine or excrement, for man or animals, is the great cause of unwholesome nests of water. Probably one fourth of the sickness and death in civilized communities arises directly or indirectly from this one cause, and, unfortunately, even when we are fully forewarned of this imminent danger to health, it is exceedingly difficult and most thickly populated places to secure a source of water supply with which sewage has not been mingled.
It is little wonder, that 100 years ago and even further back, people developed a taste for wine and other forms of alcohol, which essentially had to be distilled. This was one way to actually purify water or something drinkable, and help people avoid some of the issues that were probably readily found in the water supply of many urban areas. If you were to travel back in time, and you were looking for a small business opportunity to earn a good living in the past, setting up some sort of water purification system, could definitely help a person earn a good living and possibly change the course of history not to mention decreasing the deaths of many children in newborns. In fact the war old would probably be more populous today, if it had not been for this issue.
Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:
- The Ovaries
The Ovaries.– The organs are situated contiguously to the womb. They signify eggs from their shape, and they are the parts which the male semen acts upon to produce the phenomenon of pregnancy. They are in large eye inflammation in their passage down the fallopian tubes, once a month during the middle. A female life, produces the condition familiarly known as menstruation. The plate also affords another view of the vagina.
And that is a pretty short paragraph to describe the process of reproduction. I believe it would be difficult to describe this process any more succinctly or with any less detail especially a medical textbook. It’s with short descriptions like this, that I wonder how on the world the author ever manage to squeeze 1700 pages out of a medical textbook.
Sometimes I wonder if the short nondescriptive descriptions might have been more prevalent a hundred years ago and possibly super prevalent even further back. Maybe there was something lingering in the human psyche from the days when monks transcribed books by hand that led authors to avoiding words. If it wasn’t for this author’s ability to spot on with a lot of gibberish whenever he feels like it, I might suspect such a thing. The fact that the author did not use a lot of language here leads me to believe that the author was avoiding the topic.
If ancient authors and written descriptions about to sail from Europe to India across the ocean in a similar style, it is no wonder that Columbus ended up only making it half way there suffering through a number of endless caribbean cruises before making landfall.
My point is that as you go back in time and read writing that was written years and years and years ago different things seem important. Different subjective requirements come in to play in the writing and in the reading. The lack of objectivity leaves future readers at a loss for the detail that they need to make heads or tails out of text and information. It’s an important example of why the objectivity is important in writing scientific information. The subject of writing is also important in the two can be balanced what they need to be labeled such that future readers will understand those items that were understood to be fact as opposed to those items that were still under speculation.
- Lung Air Cells
Lung Air Cells. — Each air cell varies in size from the seventieth to the one two-hundredth parts of an inch in diameter. The number of aerosols in the two lungs is truly surprising, they’re been certainly not less than 600,000,000, though according to Dr. Addison’s computation there are 1,700,000,000, equivalent to 1,500 square feet of surface on which the process of purifying the blood is constantly in continuously going on in a healthy lung.
_____________________
The book doesn’t mention who Dr. Addison is or how he reached his computation, a hundred years later these numbers seem highly questionable if for no other reason than they are not supported, there’s no footnote in the book, there’s no mention of who Dr. Addison is or what he’s done or why his numbers should be considered. There’s no mention of who came up with the original numbers that Dr. Addison’s numbers seem to refute.
Also I’ve referenced the diagrams from chart 2, this includes three images of the lungs diagrammed and you can compare those to modern-day diagrams of the lungs from a Google image search.
- Quantity of Water Needed
Quantity of Water Needed.-the quantity of water needed by man and animals must therefore be very carefully calculated. Repeated experiments upon a very extended scale in England have shown that a healthy man requires daily as drink from 2 to 4 pints of water, this amount being in addition to that which is swallowed as moisture and food. The amount required for cooking is estimated at from having gallantly gallon or more. To this quantity, Dr. Parkes considers should be added for daily ablution, including a sponge bath, 5 gallons; daily share of kitchen and other utensils, and house washing, 3 gallons; and share of clothes washing, another 3 gallons; making up a total of a little over 12 gallons for each individual daily. In the poorer districts of the city of London, the amount used is stated to be only about 5 gallons daily. A shower-bath will require about 4 gallons extra, and a plunge-bath from 40 to 60 gallons. Where water-closets are used in additional quantity of from 4 to 6 gallons daily for each person must be provided.
In general this is actually one of the more interesting paragraphs that I found in this book. It describes several things that I believe could be rather unique. First it discusses the quantity of water needed for human consumption. It describes experiments done in England and considering that this book was published sometime around the turn-of-the-century around 1916 by my estimates, this would seem to indicate a human water consumption estimates of 2 to 4 pints presented 20 years before the FDA guidelines written by a bureaucrat that suggested that people should drink 8 cups of water a day.
Furthermore I find this one interesting from the perspective that it discusses how much water people may have used around the turn-of-the-century. I live in the Southeast of the United States and today we are in a drought.. Water consumption is definitely an important issue for the Southeast United States and many other areas of the world. And therefore when I listen to and read some of the items here that describe how much water should be used or could be used, it seems strikingly different than what we might use today, especially as we have many more appliances that use water, and many newer appliances that are designed to be energy-efficient. Very very interesting section, some of those water estimates seemed very high by todays standards and some seemed relatively low, at dollhouses levels.