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.

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.

• The Kidneys
  
  

  The Kidneys.– The kidneys are two glandular bodies, having for their functions the secretion of urine.  The form of the kidney resembles a French bean; its average length team from four to four and a half inches, two inches in breadth and one in thickness.  The two kidneys are situated one on each side of the spine and the lumbar region, opposite the last two dorsal and two first lumbar vertebrae; they are a brownish-read color flattened from before word, and grooved on the anterior border for the reception of the great vessels.

  _____________________

  I do not know what a French bean looks like, but I suspect people to read the book 100 years ago probably did.  I suppose this is some sort of reference point is lost its way over the years even though I’m sure there are a few people that knows what this still is.  This book was written to be a common reference for the everyday person hundred years ago, but it probably would not connect home with everyday people in the current century.  There are a number of ways to look at this, but it is important to remember that a reference that can be understood is very important when you’re trying to help somebody possibly save their life or prevent further injury, if you give a reference to medical supplies describing what they look like and where they should be located, but the person that you tell doesn’t understand what you’re saying it could be the difference between life and death.  That said, this is more of an anatomy lesson and it is doubtful that the average person really needed to know what the kidneys look like in a human person.  This was probably more beneficial for a person that might actually consider studying it as an in depth later on down the road.

• Typhoid Fever from Polluted Water
  
  

  Typhoid Fever from Polluted Water. — the remarks which have been already made with regard to the influence of impure water on the spread of cholera, apply still with greater force to the causation of typhoid fever. So, does this move propagation that the assertion may be ventured that few readers of these pages have not lost some near relative or beloved friend from the dreaded disease arising in this way, although the true source of the infection was perhaps, at the time it occurred, quite unsuspected.

  Okay so if you have been following this recent series on typhoid fever and cholera, the general theme here is that polluted water and contaminants brought to water sources were extremely dangerous for what we would consider civilization just a hundred years ago.  It might be a little bit more difficult to picture something of an epidemic raging through London or New York City today.  However you might consider just how fragile ecosystems of the city’s are today.  They rely on massive systems to clean the water.  If power to those systems were to fail for an extended period of time, the spread of disease could rapidly start up with population centers at levels that are much higher than they ever were one hundred years ago.

  There is only so much that any government agency or even the military for that matter can do to potentially help in a situation like that.  We have recently seen what happened in New Orleans were a population of just one million people were essentially left behind.  That occurred during a flood after a hurricane, and so there were aspects of that situation that definitely complicated things.

  However, if we consider just how big of a failure a given city might experience when it has a population of several million people in it, things could be much more dangerous.  I’m not just talking about the potential for riots and looting, and the necessary levels of police forces, National Guard, and other members needed to come in and secure the area.  I’m talking about the need of infrastructure and support systems necessary to keep the city functioning.

  A possible better example of a complete breakdown of the system, could probably be evidenced in the failure that took hold in Baghdad following the invasion of US troops.  Not only did the system fail from a water supply and electricity supply perspective, but the residents took to sabotaging and looting some of the equipment that made those systems work.

  We often times here about how the military was unprepared for that particular situation, and we think about soldiers going into battle without the proper Kevlar vests, or armor plating on Humvees or even little things like replacement Kevlar helmets, or 5.11 Tactical Knives, or night vision goggles.  We don’t always think about the fact that they don’t go into a city armed with plumbers and engineers, and plumbers and engineers at levels large enough to actually run the city.

  So as we look back on this historical accounting of the perils of these diseases, we should not make the mistake of thinking, that this could not happen to us.  It is very possible that we are only a few days of electricity away from being reduced to a similar state or level of technology needed to protect us.  In Zimbabwe it actually took a couple years, as the President of that country systematically dismantled his country with one failed policy after the next, but we have also seen a President in the United States, whose bad policies have similarly brought an even larger more successful country down, it might not be impossible for a different President to finish the job.

  

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