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pipe, and this should be of lead, be outside the house, and
be wide open at the top, three conditions scarcely ever
found; it should also be untrapped at its base, so as to
serve as a ventilator to the sewer, unless a special ventilating
pipe is provided, which must be done if the soil pipe
is within the house during a part or the whole of its
course. The rain water pipes should end over the surface
of the yard or area, and the waste and sink pipes should
end over a large syphon trap in the yard (bell traps
are worse than useless); waste pipes may be made to end
in rain water pipes when these are not directly connected
with the sewer.
According to my experience, the breathing of tainted
air is rarely the cause of enteric fever, and this observation
is well illustrated by the fact that it has been clearly shown,
both in Paris and London, that men who work in cesspools
and in sewers, and who of necessity breathe a great deal of
tainted air, are not subject to this fever; and the same may
be said of cholera, indeed the exemption of these men from
the disease during cholera epidemics is a matter of notoriety
since Parent Duchatelet's researches. But it does not follow
that sewer air does not or may not occasionally contain the
poison; on the contrary I am quite convinced that it is by
means of the connections of houses with the sewers that
the poison of enteric fever is introduced into them, and that
by means of sewer air. The chief way in which this is
effected is through the waste pipe of the drinking water
cistern; this pipe very frequently goes directly into the
house sewer, and is often its only ventilator, that is to say,
that the only way in which foul air can escape from the
sewer is up the waste pipe into the cistern which supplies
drinking water; this foul air is confined between the surface