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6
thousands: but of preventive medicine that it has saved its tens
of thousands. Through every possible crack and crevice and when
we least expect it disease finds an entrance. Of course we see plainly
enough how it gets in when it comes through the widely-opened
door. But this is not its usual way, and it is more difficult to be
on the alert when it comes in an unexpected manner and at an
unexpected time. We see, moreover, the open door clearly enough
when other people leave it open, but we do not see it quite so
readily when we leave it open ourselves.
Churches, chapels, schools, large assemblies of every kind, the
waiting rooms of hospitals and dispensaries, public conveyances,
perchance even circulating libraries, books or tracts, may have
much or little to answer for, but the medical profession must remember
the possibility that they may themselves act as the carriers as
well as the curers of disease. I wish I could feel that it was unnecessary
to mention so ugly a fact, but the remedy is only to be found in
thoroughly grasping the difficulty. It is folly to preach that we as
a profession possess any peculiar or special immunity to disease
ourselves, and the day I hope has for ever gone by when we should
attempt to persuade the public that we are in the possession of
some secret drug—some alchemical elixir—some patent nostrum
whereby we alone of all men, fail to spread disease in the course of
our daily rounds. We carry with us no charmed life, no supernatural
existence, rendering us exceptions to the ordinary laws of
disease governing the lives of men generally. I have been painfully
impressed with certain cases of late which leave me but little reason
to doubt what has been the true cause of an outbreak of infectious
disease in a family known to me. Of course, the physician must
visit more than a patient a day, and he must be at the bedside of
infectious cases; but the least he can do after seeing a patient
suffering from a disease possible of communication, is to adopt
every means in his power to prevent his being the innocent cause
of its spread, and more especially should this be the case when he
is called to the bedside of one who is peculiarly ready to receive the
seeds of diseases which prove in her case so invariably fatal, and
so rob her of life at the very moment she is giving life to another.
Some of the statistics in the two followingTables, (Nos. V & VI),
have been referred to, and need no further comment.