Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1884-07-19
THE ADVANCE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWL.
EDGE CONCERNING EPIDEMIC DIS.
EASE, AND IT'S RESISTANCE.

The advent of any great disease that be-
comes epidemic, fearful as it may be to the
race evolves good in the attrition Of views
OF learned men regarding it. Thus in the
present cholera revival, it cannot be but
that the epidemic will broaden scientific
knowledge concerning it, and give US new
methods of arriving at the truth. Out of
these we must bring remedies and means
OF resistance; so with the recurrence of
epidemics the danger of them is lessened,
and the fear of them reduced. Sanitary
science, which has had no superior in the
advances made by it, would be dubbed
cheat had it not given us the means of de-
Tending ourselves, to a very great extent,
against disease.
In the time of the early plaques it IS not
conceivable that there could have been
such mortality, distress and terror had the
people known what men of this day do re-
earding public sanitation. The plague
was born of filth in cities and dense popu-
lations, and no measures such as we now
employ were used to remove the causes of
the disease Indeed, it was thought by
mutitudes to be a visitation Of God, and
that submission was necessary. But at this
day we have come to know that about
every i'll that visits US is the result of the
violation of natural laws We know that
there are physical causes for all physical
Ills, and sanitary science performs its high
est Office in insuucting US how to avoid the
evil, and how TO resist it, if we are driven
to meet it face to face. We can conceive Of
the time when medical research and sani-
tary discovery Will find the specific for
cholera after it has developed, We know
now that if its seat Of origination was
within the jurisdiction of sanitarians
of England, America, France or Germany,
the possibility of cholera breaking out
could be prevented II originates at fomts
where every sanitary law is deiied, and
takes up its march, gathering recruits at
every step, until it meets the sanitarians Of
advanced civilization, and in them it en-
counters its first real obstacles
But these are not at all agreed as to what
to do 70 resist the invader Thus, Dr.
Koch, the distinguished discoyerer, insists
that de microbe of cholera cannot be
transmitted in clothing charged with the
bodily excretions of patients, if the matter
has dried, and therefore he scouts the idea
Of f,unigation He holds, as we under
stand him, that heat and dry atmosphere
are certain death to the cholera germ. and
he does not believe that it travels in the
air. So, too, the telegraph informs us that
the French Academy Of Medicine has re-
solved that disinfection of clothing, etc, is
ineiticacious and illusorv. On the other
hand, the sanitarians of America and Eng
land bring forward the strongest evidences
of the efficacy Of fumigation and disinfec-
ton, while isolation Of the patients is
matter upon which they are agreed. Why?
Because they believe that the disease is
hansmissible in clothing, papers, and in
the atmosphere. They are not unit, how
ever, as to the value of quarantine, since
some show thet the disease has appeared
at remote points distant from each other
and the seaboard simultaneously, in
common county, as was the case in the
United States on two occasions. Yet we
have before us now the testimony of the
London Standard that the cholera which
broke out in London in 1878 among one
hundred newly-arrived immigrants was
confined TO them by their instant
removal to hospital ship. and The COM
plete isolation of the vessel. and not case