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The rapidity with which a wound in a reasonably healthy individual, cleaned and dressed on modern surgical principles, will heal, is almost incredible, until it has actually been seen. The principal danger of garden-soil or street-dust in a wound is not so much from pus-germs, though these may be present, as from another "bug" the tetanus or lockjaw bacillus.
At all events, so poorly are these pus-germs able to preserve their vigor and power of attack, not merely outside of the human body, but outside of some wound or sore spot, that it is practically certain that eight-tenths of all cases of wound-infection or blood-poisoning come directly from some previous festering wound, sore, ulcer, scab, boil, or pimple, in or on some other human being or animal.
The next commonest point of attack of these pus-germs, if they once get into the body, and by far the most dangerous, is the heart, as in rheumatism and other fevers. So that, common, and, in many instances, comparatively mild as they are, the pus-germs in the aggregate are responsible for a very large amount of damage to the human body.
Now comes the question, how is this to be done? Fortunately it is not necessary to hunt out and destroy the pus-germs in their breeding-places outside of the human body. As we have seen, they do not long retain their vitality out of doors, or as a rule even in the dust of rooms and dirt of houses, unless the latter have been recently contaminated with the dressings of, or discharges from, wounds.
Anything which lowers the general health and strength and weakens the resisting power of the body will make it much easier for pus-germs to get an entrance into it, and overwhelm it; so that, after prolonged famines for instance, or among the population of besieged cities, or in armies or exploring expeditions which have been deprived of food and exposed to great hardship, the merest scratch will fester and inflame, and give rise to a serious and even fatal attack of blood-poisoning, erysipelas, hospital gangrene, etc.
If it be a cut on the finger, or scratch on the hand, for instance, don't suck it, or lick it, unless you can give an absolutely clean bill of health to your gums and teeth. If not thoroughly brushed three or four times a day, they are sure to be swarming with germs of twenty or thirty different species, which not infrequently include one or both of the pus-germs.
This is the reason why, up to half a century ago, by a strange paradox hospitals were among the most dangerous places to perform operations in, on account of the abundance of wounds or sores always present for the pus-germs to breed in, and the fact that out of fifty or more wound-cases, there was practically certain to be one or two infected ones to poison the whole lot.
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