The age-herald., 1898-01-09
Is There Danger
 En che Hand- Shake :?

Is it possible for one man to communicate disease to another by the shaking of hands?
 If this question be true should the GUS tom be abandoned or should it be modified under medical instruction so as to min imize the danger?
 That a man possessing a filthy hand whereon microbes may have collected in the course of days labor, unwashed since possible contact with disease germs, might convey disease by direct contagion is ip disputable. But if the two persons who meet and greet each other in this manner be cleanly and of apparently good habits, could such think result? According to pr. Nathan Breiter, formerly of Chicago and now of New York, it mssht. In fact, pr. Breiter is emphatic in his assertion that cases oI disease have been so com municated.
 No physician, however welded to the germ theory, even if he saw bacilli in ev- erything in nature, would assert that dis ease follows every contact with these germs. Neither would any physician of this age, no matter if he opposed the germ idea altogether, deny that disease can and is communicated by digital contact. Should he do so he would be forced to deny all the hard lesons learned over the dissecting table. lie must declare that the efforts maQe III all eAplOIdliOttS lO piS- vent sepsis are useless and foolish. If blood poisoning results from septic in- 1uences in a cadaver it is conveyed to the student through manual contasion
 The existence of micro-c rganisms inmical to life and health has been established be- yond dispute pr. Breiter founds his the sis, recently printed in the Medical Record, on this hypthesis. But his leading point insisted upon with much force, is the dan- ger which is hidden in the apparently harmless and sometimes pleasing custom of shaking hands, He says:
 That the surface of the human body is a very hotbed for the propagation of great variety of micro organisms Fuer- binger Mittman, Bizzozero, Magiora and Welch have elucidated most conclusiyely. It is certainly beyond the sadow of doubt that in the presence of a predisposing fac tor and sometimes even without that, the nicrobic diseases arel ushered into exist ence by their individual prototypes, this be- ing essentially brought about by contact in some way of the two contingent forces Modern surgery is. founded on this princi-, pie. The carefulness with which we pre- pare our hands and surgical instruments before and after a surgical operation well exempliies the importance of a familiarity with its dangers in every sense. We recog- nize that many of our mcrobic diseases especially of the exanthematic type, elim- mate their toxic element very largely through the medium of the skin, which undergoes extensive exfoliation dissemin- ating the poison far and wide. Iso- Iation is resorted to and enforced most rig orously, thereby checking the spread of the disease, and then disinfectants lavishly used cause the destruction of the offend- ing armies. In the era of scientific pro- phylaxis consequent upon the introduction of the microscope. bacteriology and anti septics we find steady decline of epidem- ics either developing in the outer world or our hispital wards. Yet accidental inocula- of f,,b Sp1a1InOX and cinia. as well as more horrible diseases still exist and are but demonstrations of either an unavoidable cause or faulty ob- servance of established data