The Wellington enterprise. [volume] (Wellington, Ohio) 1867-188?, 1883-11-07
Ice as a Vehicle for Impurities.

1 believe that the first instance in
which the consumption of ice was
shown to have been followed by an out
break of disease is that recorded in the
Seventh Annual Report of the State
Board of Health of Massachusetts.
The occurrence took place in one of
the large hotels at Rye Beach, New
Hampshire. At the beginning of the
season of 1875 about a thousand Wis
itors were assembled at Rye Beach, and
a considerable number were attacked
with series of symptoms which led
to the suspicion that they had consumed
some noxious article. The incidence of
the disease was entirely confined to
three hundred persons occupying one
of the large hotels. The sanitary state
of this hotel was said to have been ex-
ceptionally good, and, although sus-
picion seemed at first to attach to the
water supply, yet the disease was found
to have effected many who, '.having
apprehended trouble from the use of
the water" which was strongly inn
pregnated with salts of lime and mag
nesia, s'had carefully limited themselves
since their arrival to other beverages"
Indeed, as the result of a careful pro-
cess of elimination, suspicion came at
last to be directed to the ice furnished
to the house. The water obtained by
melting the ice was discolored and
charged with suspended matter, and
gave off decidedly disagreeable odor;
the atmosphere of the ice-house was Of
fensive, and some persons who had
used the ice away from the
hotel were found to have suffered in
the same way from violent illness.
The ice in question had been de-
rived from a local pond, the water of
which was found to have become foul
from long-continued stagnation; one
portion of the pond, measuring about
five hundred feet in length and one
hundred and fifty feet in width, was oc-
cupied by "a homogeneous mass of
putrescent matter" A piece of ice,
carefully cleansed from all surface i'm
purities, was then melted, and the water
thus obtained was submitted to chemi-
cal analysis, the result being the detec-
ton in it of quantity of .'decaying
organic matter" The use of the ice
had also in the mean time been discon-
tinued. and coincident with its disuse
s'there was observed an abrupt ameli-
Grafton in the symptoms of nearly all
who had hitherto been i'll" So, also,
no fresh attacks occurred during the
remainder of the season.
Even among the more educated
classes there prevails an impression that
even if water is contaminated it is pur-
fled by freezing. Many experiments
have, however, shown the fallacy of
this view. In some of these made re-
Gently by Mr.. c. P. Pengra, an Ameri-
can chemist, various organic matters
(urea, albumen, etc.) were mixed with
water and the specimens were gradual
ly frozen. A certain amount of purifi-
cation did take place-the ice contain
ing thirty and even forty per cent. less
organic matter than the unfrozen
liquid. But a large amount of the
added pollution remained. and the in
vestigator, though expressing surprise
that the publication had been as great
as it was, SAYS that the experiments af-
ford abundant proof that we ought not
Co tolerate the indiscriminate collection
of ice.-R. ThOrne 7horDe, ia Popular
Science Monthly.
The main trouble of the Mexican
II C