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Updated: May 3, 2025
The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the red races of America perished or are going fast. The numbers of those dead from war and epidemics leave still lacking the full explanation of the fearful facts.
Broken watermains, gaspipes and sewers were followed by typhus and typhoid and smallpox, flux, cholera and bubonic plague. The hundreds of thousands of deaths relieved only in small degree the overcrowding; for the epidemics displaced those refugees sheltered in the schoolhouses, long since closed, when these were made auxiliary to the inadequate hospitals.
They have enemies which seize them, but an enemy is not a parasite. On the other hand, too, they have mastered a variety of insects, and use them for their delectation and profit. Hive bees are likewise fairly free from parasites, unless, indeed, their so-called dysentery is caused by some minute microbe. These epidemics, however, are rare.
In the Middle Ages, for instance, epidemics were ascribed with great simplicity, to a direct act of divine chastisement; to-day they are attributed to the direct action of microbes. Papin's steam machines suggested diabolical intervention. But these are precisely the kind of prejudices which, like all fantasies, swarm in the void of ignorance.
During these eight months Barbicane did not leave Stony Hill for a minute; whilst he narrowly watched over the boring operations, he took every precaution to insure the health and well-being of his workmen, and he was fortunate enough to avoid the epidemics common to large agglomerations of men, and so disastrous in those regions of the globe exposed to tropical influence.
It may be true that it would not be possible to transform still more New York hotels into dancing halls, since the innovation of this fashion, which suggests the dancing epidemics of mediæval times, has reached practically every fashionable hostelry.
Many of the epidemics of disease that decimate the populations of Eastern countries, and sometimes travel into the West, originate from these abominable caravans of the dead and kindred irrationalities of the illogical and childlike Oriental.
These epidemics, those of smallpox and other diseases that at times make their appearance in Yucatan, generally present themselves after the rainy season, particularly if the rains have been excessive.
She has thrown such light on the causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that the presence of cholera and probably of all zymotic diseases in any place, is usually a sin and a shame, for which the owners and authorities of that place ought to be punishable by law, as destroyers of their fellow-men; while for the weak, for those who, in the barbarous and semi-barbarous state and out of that last we are only just emerging how much has she done; an earnest of much more which she will do?
Means remain to be found of administering the coup de grâce to the few epidemics which have not yet been extirpated, but linger in a crippled condition. This will be aided by the illustrations afforded of processes of draining, ventilation, etc. Man's health rests in that of his stomach. The food question is a concern of the physician as well as of the publicist.
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