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Updated: June 8, 2025
Upon it were conducted every one of the experiments whose results widened our knowledge, until we found that this bacillus and no other would cause diphtheria; that instead of getting, like many other disease-germs, into the blood, it chiefly limited itself to growing and multiplying upon a comparatively small patch of the body-surface, most commonly of the throat; that most of its serious and fatal results upon the body were produced, not by the entrance of the germs themselves into the blood, but by the absorption of the toxins or poisons produced by them on the moist surface of the throat, just as the yeast plant will produce alcohol in grape juice or sweet cider.
"How he gloated on those cultivations of disease-germs!" A disturbing thought struck him. He turned to the bench by the vapour-bath, and then very quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt hastily in his pockets, and then rushed to the door. "I may have put it down on the hall table," he said. "Minnie!" he shouted hoarsely in the hall. "Yes, dear," came a remote voice.
The reversal of the sequence results in a moral degradation and poverty indefinitely more dangerous to the community than the slums of our great cities. For these may be controlled and cleansed; but the moral slum floods our legislatures and positions of honor and trust, and invades the churches. The mental and moral water-supply of the community is loaded with disease-germs.
Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse.
Our skin, as you remember, is one of the most wonderful water-proof, germ-proof, hot-and-cold-proof coatings in the world; and as long as it remains unbroken, none but a few of the most virulent disease-germs can get through it into the body. Boils and Carbuncles, their Cause and their Cure.
When once we know who our wound-enemies are, whence they came, and how they are carried, the fate of the battle is practically in our own hands. Like most disease-germs our wound-infection foes are literally "they of our own household." They don't pounce down upon us from the trees, or lie in wait for us in the thickets, or creep in the grass, or grow in the soil, or swarm in our food.
"Insufficient water drinking is perhaps the commonest cause of the interruption of the normal life processes," says Doctor Theron C. Stearns. But the common drinking cup in public places probably causes far more disease than the drinking itself prevents. Particles of dead skin and disease-germs are left in the cup by each drinker. Some of the most serious diseases may be carried in this way.
There are thirty-three species which inhabit the mouth and gums alone! We are literally alive with them; but most of them are absolutely harmless, and some of them probably slightly helpful in the processes of digestion. In fevers and infections the body merely applies to disease-germs the tricks which it has learned in domesticating these millions of harmless vegetable inhabitants.
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