Observations Upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea (Classic Reprint)
Description:... Excerpt from Observations Upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea The causative agencies from which springs the plentiful harvest of child mortality in large cities may be conceived as a felted mass of rootlets almost inextricably intertwined. Those of poverty, bad housing, bad feeding, and neglect, may be severally recognized, but the extent of their interrelations with actual respiratory and alimentary disease - those to which the greater part of the mortality is referred - can be traced only with difficulty. It is the object Of this work to aid ln the labour of cutting away the matrix and entangling fibres and to lay bare the hidden ramifications of at least one important causative agency - epidemic diarrhoea.
This affection - if we accept provisionally the more novel and generally favoured conception. As to its nature - is revealed as something very like an ordinary infectious disease, and one which permeates all classes, while the excessive mortality it gathers round itself in urban centres must be regarded as something superadded, owing to the vicious circle it forms with those baneful conditions of slum life mentioned above. On the other hand, its peculiarly intimate association with the circum stances of domestic life, from the continual faecal pollution of the interior of the household by infants and others, tends to make it more so than other affections of the kind peculiarly a class disease, and an especial scourge of dirty neighbourhoods. Dirty towns may however be saved from excessive mortality by a high percentage of breast feeding.
A notable point in the interesting comparison that can be drawn between diarrhoea and typhoid fever is that, in accordance with their peculiarly opposite age-incidence curves, the marked and habitual depositing of infectious excreta within the household in the former disease may make the question of water-closet versus conservancy pan a matter of far less importance than in the latter.
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