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Updated: May 23, 2025
The deaths from these classes of causes were in a somewhat similar proportion to the mortality from all stated causes, being 58 per cent. from cholera, dysentery, and diarrhoea, and 1 per cent. from all other disorders of the digestive organs, 19 per cent. from fevers, 3.6 per cent. from diseases of the lungs, 1.3 per cent. from rheumatism, 1.3 per cent. from diseases of the brain and nervous system, and 79 per cent. from those of the zymotic class.
And no doubt the idea of the small and feeble organism of man, triumphant and omnipresent, would have seemed equally incredible to an intelligent mammoth or a palæolithic cave bear. And, finally, there is always the prospect of a new disease. As yet science has scarcely touched more than the fringe of the probabilities associated with the minute fungi that constitute our zymotic diseases.
Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, and down almost to our own day, the rate of infant mortality was almost as large as in a savage state; medical ignorance destroyed innumerable lives; antiseptic surgery being unknown, serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the low state of sanitary science, plagues such as those which in the reign of Justinian swept across the civilised world from India to Northern Europe, well nigh depopulating the globe, or the Black Death of 1349, which in England alone swept away more than half the population of the island, were but extreme forms of the destruction of population going on continually as the result of zymotic disease; while wars were not merely far more common but, owing to the famines which almost invariably followed them, were far more destructive to human life than in our own days, and deaths by violence, whether at the hands of the state or as the result of personal enmity, were of daily occurrence in all lands.
Life and property, indeed, were secure from violence almost all over the world, zymotic diseases, bacterial diseases of all sorts had practically vanished, everyone had a sufficiency of food and clothing, was warmed in the city ways and sheltered from the weather so much the almost mechanical progress of science and the physical organisation of society had accomplished.
I have heard doctors deny that there is such a thing as infection. I have heard them deny the existence of hydrophobia as a specific disease differing from tetanus. I have heard them defend prophylactic measures and prophylactic legislation as the sole and certain salvation of mankind from zymotic disease; and I have heard them denounce both as malignant spreaders of cancer and lunacy.
He had spent his hot and lusty youth on the frontier during its viking age, and at that time had naturally taken part in incidents which seemed queer to men "accustomed to die decently of zymotic diseases." I told him that an effort would doubtless be made to prevent his confirmation by the Senate, and therefore that I wanted to know all the facts in his case. Had he played faro?
Instead of training a few athletes, the real problem now presented is how to raise the general level of vitality so that children and youth may be fitted to stand the strain of modern civilization, resist zymotic diseases, and overcome the deleterious influences of city life.
Investigations made by governmental authority, and by boards of health in this country and in Great Britain, prove that zymotic diseases ordinarily result from impure air generated by vegetable or animal decay, and that in almost all cases they can be prevented by keeping the air pure.
Surely young men and women should be taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like. They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings.
The decayed animal matter sent off from the skin and lungs in a close, unventilated bedroom is one thing that generates these zymotic diseases. The decay of animal and vegetable matter in cellars, sinks, drains, and marshy districts is another cause; and the decayed vegetable matter thrown up by plowing up of decayed vegetable matter in the rich soil in new countries is another.
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