Lead Poison in Rural Districts. -- in rural districts, on the other hand, whenever Rainwater is used for drinking purposes, it is exceedingly liable to be contaminated with lead from lead lined cisterns, led service- or collection-pipes, lead ropes, or from the solder of tin roofs. As a rule, the purer the Rainwater, the greater is its action on lead with which it stands in contact; hence, therefore, the presence of a minute quantity of some salt of sulfuric acid and water is of very great importance, and serves as an invaluable protection against lead poisoning to the human beings and animals who may employ it for drinking purposes.

There are many sources for lead poisoning, chief among them is typically lead based paints.  However, today people also run the risk of exposure to heavy metals through many batteries from all those devices that require Nickel Cadmium or Lithium Ion batteries.  We don’t always think about what is going into our environment when we’re putting more laptop memory in a computer or buying a spare battery, not to mention all the cell phone batteries churning through landfill dumps each year.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Pulmonary Veins
  
  

  Pulmonary Veins. – From this net-work of arteries and air sells the radicals of the pulmonary veins arise, and, coalescing into larger and larger branches, at length accompany the arteries and return the blood to the left auricle of the heart in a purified condition. The pulmonary arteries and veins differ from the same vessels in the other parts of the body, since the former conveys the innocent blood, and the latter arterial blood.

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  I stopped on this short paragraph as I approach some larger sections. This segment again makes a reference to the word “net-work” in a style that is now out dated. The next section takes us into Breathing and then lung capacity.

• Combines Lightness and Strength
  
  

  But notwithstanding this diversity in form, the general plan constantly kept in view by the Divine Architect has been the central idea of combining lightness with the greatest possible degree of strength.  The bones of the arms and legs are round were triangular, and hollow, thus giving with the same weight a greater degree of strength that have solid, besides affording a larger surface for the attachment of muscles.

  This quick little section doesn’t make a lot of sense when you read the first sentence, you have to remember that they’re talking about bones.  The paragraph structure essentially of this section is what is slightly misleading.  My grammar school English teacher would criticize a writer for not providing a topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph.

  Regardless they have hit on a novel last backed up the design of the human body, the design of bones.  There many fascinating aspects about the human body and the strength and weight of bones is definitely a topic that has been worthy of consideration and study for many years.  In some ways we have only recently begun to understand just how important the design of bones are in carrying mass and dealing with impact.  So in this case the writers actually touching on a very interesting topic even though they are doing that and a manner that is a hundred years out of date and slightly out of focus.

• Fever Germs in Ice
  
  

  Fever Germs in Ice.  — in Connecticut, the Board of Health informs us that, in several instances, attention has been drawn to sewage contaminated ponds with ice houses upon their borders, and that several isolated cases of typhoid fever, and one death, from the free use of the ice blue by sewage, have been recorded in that state.  The curious natural experiment of the United States steamship limit, elsewhere detailed, shows conclusively that fever germs are not infallibly destroyed by a freezing, probably not by a zero temperature, and contributes its share of proof that impure eyes, especially when gathered from ponds polluted by sewage, they constitute a prolific cause of disease.