The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1903-09-26


I would not say a word to make peo-
pie less careful while an unvigilant po-
lice force permits germs to run at large.
1 wish to supplement the advice of the
learned physicians of the city and
make the people more careful. The doc
tors seem to have the idea that all that
is necessary is to prevent microbes
from getting into the stomach. Hence
their advice to boil drinking water.
deem this precaution utterly INSULT
cient. What about the pores of the
skin? Are microbes so large that they
cannot get inside when they find cuticle
windows open? Every time you wash
your face or take your semi-annual
bath, are you mot lathering yourself
with deadly microbes to creep through
to your in ards? Is not the very air
full of them? What is the good of
keeping them off the airline to your
stomach? There are other routes. My
advice is more radical. Boil the water
you wash or battle in. To make sure
work of it, boil yourself after each
ablution. Boil the things you boil the
water in. Boil the people who boil the
water, and the things you boil them
in. Before boiling yourself, boil the bath
tub you boil yourself in Boil the fam
lily. Boil the atmosphere, the cat. the
dog, the house. land all that in it is
Boil everything and the things you boil
dose of quinine and-and recover your
common sense and keep well. I have
pursued the course I advise for years,
and / am in good health today while
most of the doctors are not
Our physicians are not thorough. What
is worth doing at all is worth doing
well. Why not boil the waterworks-
the board of health-the town?
I dote on this germ theory of disease.
It is scientific, and I wish to appear
ic SarinfI1r.91 CUriO0
disease now is, like it was in Christ S
time. casting out devils.'' And it ex-
plains lots of troublesome things, and
makes commonplace things interesting
Once. if a dentist. in extracting tooth
that was fastened With nut under
your heel, tore out the side of your
head or if you happened to run rusty
nail into your foot. or If you amputated
a !unch-basketful of fingers and
thumbs with a Fourth of July toy pis-
toll, and in a week or so you had lock-
jaw. your troubles were blamed on the
dentist the nail. or the pistol People
had the idea, somehow, that tearing out
the west basement of your Uranium, sur
rounding the rusty nail with your foot.
or distributing your digits through the
circumambient atmosphere had some
thing TO do with your having lockjaw-
We know now that the old Idea was
wrong 1T was a childish ignorance"
The dentist. the nail. the pistol, had
nothing to do with it. Some uncon-
verted tetanus microbe happened to be
loafing in your vicinity at the time and
concluded to live with YOU and on you.
You would have had lockjaw just the
same if you had never seen the dentist,
coralled the nail, or fooled with the pat
riotic shooting apparatus. 1t is a great
theory, and saves lots of suffering by
fixing the mind on science instead of
upon trivial things. The thing for US to
do is not to avoid dentists and other
merely apparent sources of misery, but
to avoid microbes by practicing the sys-
tenn 1 recommend. Then we can laugh
to scorn all the threatened ills of life.