Effect of Metallic Impurities.-- the effects of minute traces of metallic substances in drinking water have not yet been ascertained with sufficient accuracy, but it is quite possible that the entire sanitary condition of the district may depend in some measure on impurities of this description. Mr. Wanklyn suggests that the well-known salutary effect of what is called change of air may be, in reality, partly due to the escape from some extremely small metallic impurities in the water of the section of country from which removal takes place.

Well today, people know that heavy metals and water can be extremely poisonous or problematic for people to consume water with these impurities in place. It is somewhat remarkable that this had not been figured out as few as 100 years ago, and that what is relatively common knowledge today was only hypothetical esoteric pseudoscience 100 years back.  It's no wonder that so many developed countries today have so many heavy metal messes to clean up around the world.  Today people are looking for the best fat burners that they can buy so they can load up on McDonald's french fries and eat all that they want, we'll just a few years back they are looking for safe water to drink, and not even knowing what safe was.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Ventricles of the Heart
  
  

  Ventricles of the Heart. — the walls of the left ventricle, which propels the blood to the remotest corners of the human frame, are correspondingly thicker and stronger than those of the right, which forces the blood to the lungs only. Arising from the right ventricle is seeing the blue pulmonary artery, conveying its foul, poisonous, vitiated and venous stream to the lungs, well from the left ventricle is observed a large main artery of the circulatory system — the aorta — from the arch of which arise the right and left carotid arteries.

  __________
  So in the section they jump back into describing parts of the heart as foul and poisonous? There definitely seems to be a lack of knowledge or understanding of what’s going on here, I’m no medical professional bottom of aspirin in about five minutes when the world people might have thought that the ventricles of a heart deliver poisonous blood to the lungs? Seems absurd.

  And was an aside, our blog is currently funded in part through blog advertising. You may notice is from time to time, we work with an excellent firm that provides us with ad placements throughout our blog. These ad placements are very unobtrusive and help keep us working to delve further into an understanding of medicine as it was taught a hundred years ago and as our culture looks at medicine today.

• Spread of Typhoid
  
  

  Spread of Typhoid.  — Sir William Jenner, than whom no higher medical authority could well be quoted, in commenting upon this point, says: the spread of typhoid fever is, if possible, less disputable than the spread of cholera by the same means; solitary cases, outbreaks confined to single houses, to small villages into parts of large towns, cases are isolated it seems from all sources of policy, and epidemics affecting the inhabitants of large though limited localities, have all united to support, either testimony, the truth of the opinion that the admixture of a trace of excrement, but especially of excrement from a typhoid fever patient, with the water supply for drinking purposes, is the most efficient cause of the spread of the disease, and that the diffusion of them lady in a given locality is limited or otherwise, and limited just in proportion as the dwellers in that locality to write their supply of drinking water from polluted sources.

   

  As we transition away from the topic of cholera and further into typhoid fever, it is apparent that the book draws a number of similarities.  Again though we see references to people that are quoted as authorities, however we have no other attribute nation to those people other than their given name.  One hundred years ago, there may have been few people with the name of William Jenner, I suspect that is no longer the case.

• Lead Palsy
  
  

  Lead Palsy. — under some special circumstances, not at present well understood, extremely minute amounts of lead in water may prove injurious. Thus, for example, Dr. Angus Smith speaks of cases in which lead paralysis, or palsy, was apparently produced by water containing only 1/100TH of a grain of lead to the gallon.

  I’d like to veer off the topic of lead poisoning for a second and just meditate on the fact that until I engaged in reading this section of the book, I had not taken the time to learn the definition of ‘palsy’

  Is is actually an alternative to the word paralysis, and might even be a slang term or abbreviated version of the word.  My own apathetic ignorance as it relates to this word, which to my ears in 2008 even sounds a little politically incorrect, speaks to a decrease in the threat of cerebral palsy even though paralysis (palsy) is still a real problem as a result of injuries.  I might be more in tune with seeking a car insurance quote than fearing for the potential of developing palsy as a result of lead poisoning.