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7
having typhoid in your house." When we consider, I
say, all this, and that almost every case might be prevented
if people only took a little more care about their sanitary
arrangements beforehand, and did not wait for fever to come
and awake them out of their apathy, we feel that no
excuse is needed for discussing a disease which might
otherwise seem to be unimportant, at greater length than
the rest, especially as the year has been so remarkable
for freedom from disease generally.
There is now no doubt whatever that enteric fever is
especially propagated by the contamination of water drunk
or of air breathed with a poison derived from the stools of
persons already suffering from the disease, and this indicates
the necessity of thoroughly disinfecting such stools
before throwing them down the water closet. But how do
water and air get so contaminated ? In several ways;
where the drinking water is derived from wells, it may be
contaminated by direct pollution from some leaky cesspit
or sewer, and the same may happen where water, delivered
on the premises good, is stored in underground tanks, a
practice which should always be discountenanced; but it
more frequently happens in large towns from the connection
between the interior of houses and the sewers, especially
when, as is too often the case, these sewers are not properly
ventilated. The interior of a house is usually connected
with the sewer by means of the soil pipe, the sink
pipes, the waste pipes of baths, cisterns, &c., and very
frequently by the waste pipe of the cistern which supplies
drinking water.
Now none of the pipes about a house, not even the
rain water pipes (or only exceptionally these), should enter
the sewer directly, with the single exception of the soil