The London Fever Hospital; Nurse Flower, 1891

FROM The Common Nature of Epidemics and Their Relation to Climate and Civilization (Lippincott, 1866) by Thomas Southwood Smith, M.D.:

If indeed the emanations thrown off from the living body formed permanent and powerful poisons, like miasms connected with the products of decomposition, and if they were, like such products, capable of being conveyed unchanged to great distances, we should be able to live only in solitude; we could never meet in society, for we should poison each other; the first symptom of illness would be the signal for the abandonment of the sick, and we should be compelled by a due regard to self-preservation to withhold from persons afflicted with disease every kind and degree of assistance that required personal attendance.

Happily, we are not so constituted, and the evidence that has been adduced of the narrowness of the sphere even of the most virulent contagion, shows the groundlessness of the alarm sometimes entertained respecting this dreaded agent, while it points to the certain means of destroying it. The London Fever Hospital is separated from the Small-Pox Hospital only by the space of between thirty and forty feet, and the windows of the wards of both establishments are immediately opposite each other: yet there is no instance of the communication of small-pox to the typhus patients, nor of typhus to the small-pox patients; nor of either disease to the convalescent, or to the official inmates of the adjoining establishment. There does not appear to be a single instance on record, in any country, of the extension of infection beyond the walls of an hospital, or even of a lazar-house, so as to injure in any manner the nearest inhabitants.

— Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

I can’t thank you enough for your three latest posts.  Especially the above.

If germs caused disease, there would be no doctors or nurses left, anywhere.  Doctors in their offices see countless people with infections from hell, yet they show up for work day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

Disease (abnormality/weakness in the body) causes germs to show up.

I hope you have a stash of useful currency, whatever else you need, and that your house is paid up.  So many are not that fortunate but I guess you realize that.

This is terrible, and so unnecessary, though in the long run I do think God has some kind of plan.  Purgatory before death, maybe.  Gary Barnett understands all too well what is happening.  I wonder if he’ll be run out of town on a rail.

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