View report page

62
attack of the disease, such as is most likely to occur if vaccination
has been efficiently performed. The child is not well, but it is not
ill enough to be kept at home, and so it goes to school, the mother
not objecting to get rid of it for a time, for the sake of peace and
quietness. It thus becomes the purveyor of disease to its schoolfellows.
Or again, a laundry may be a serious means of spreading the
disease. Clothes from an infected house, reeking with the poison,
take their place in the wash-tub and in the laundry with other
clothes from non-infected houses.
Consider these, and a hundred other means of diffusion. I
marvel not that we have had so much Small Pox, but I marvel
greatly that we have had so little,
What then I have to consider, lastly, are the practical points to
be borne in mind in dealing with an outbreak of Small Pox, or
other infectious disease.
1. First of all, never neglect a single case, but deal energetically
with it. The public are curiously forgetful of this great rule. A
child is ill, you press the parents to send it to a Hospital; but
they will not hear of it, and the only answer you can get is an
expression of hope that none of the other children will catch it, with
a half promise that, if a second case occurs, they will send it to the
Hospital. But then comes the difficulty, the Sanitary authority is
frequently ignorant of, and has only imperfect means of discovering,
the existence of the case. To remedy this imperfection in our
Sanitary Laws, has been a subject lately of serious thought among
Sanitarians. I confess I was formerly of opinion that it would be advisable
for the law to compel every medical man to give notice to the
Sanitary authority immediately a case of infectious disease occurred in
his practice. There are, however, serious difficulties in this method
of obtaining information, and certainly not one of the least would be
that it would render professional men too much like common
informers or medical detectives, and so destroy that mutual
confidence between the doctor and the family, which in our
profession is very essential. I am now convinced that the better
plan, and one which was laid before the President of the Local