486 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



friends of a yellow-fever convalescent. But even with chile they 

 would hesitate to tempt him with garbanzas or guisado, well knowing 

 that the mere smell of greasy viands is often enough to bring on a re- 

 lapse of the vomit. Disagreeable smells of any kind are, in fact, a 

 potent adjuvant, if not independent cause, of a febrile diathesis. " A 

 manufacture of artificial manure," says Professor Grainger, " formerly 

 existedimm ediately opposite Christchurch workhouse, Spitalfields, 

 "which building was occupied by about four hundred children with a 

 few adult paupers. Whenever the works were actively carried on, 

 particularly when the wind blew in the direction of the house, there 

 were produced numerous cases of fever, of an intractable and typhoid 

 form. . . . The proprietor at last was compelled to close his estab- 

 lishment, and the children returned to their ordinary health. Five 

 months afterward, the works were recommenced ; in a day or two 

 subsequently, the wind blowing from the manufactory, a most power- 

 ful stench pervaded the building. In the night following forty-five 

 of the boys, whose dormitories faced the manufactory, were again 

 seized with severe diarrhoea, while the girls, whose dormitories were in 

 a more distant part, and faced in another direction, escaped. The 

 manufactory having been again suppressed, there was no subsequent 

 return of the diarrhoea " (" Report on the Hygienic Condition of the 

 Metropolis," p. 36). 



The Turkish custom-house officers fumigate their quarantine-build- 

 ings with a powerful but agreeably aromatic kind of incense-powder, 

 which seems to serve all the purposes of disinfection, and could in 

 many cases be substituted for the carbolic-acid libations that fill our 

 hospitals with their scandalous odors. To the stomach of a fever- 

 patient, however, the smell of boiling fat is still more offensive, and 

 kitchen-fumes should be carefully excluded from the sick-room. 



If these precautions are adopted in time, a common remittent gen- 

 erally terminates with the third fit, and yellow fever takes the form of 

 a " walking case," as the Memphis physicians call that mild type of 

 the disease which limits its symptoms to a few shivering fits, and a 

 night's headache, and seems, in fact, to be nothing but a modified sort 

 of a summer ague. Every pyrexial affection is essentially an enteric 

 disorder, a bowel-complaint, and dietetic management alone will gen- 

 erally insure a favorable issue of the disease. The Spanish cigar-ped- 

 dlers and Spanish and Italian fruit-venders of New Orleans inhabit 

 the vilest alleys of the " French quarter," but their frugality has 

 saved them again and again, when their flesh-eating neighbors died by 

 hundreds. I have known vegetarians to survive in tenements where 

 the rooms above, below, and around them were filled with fever- 

 stricken families decimated from week to week, dreading removal to 

 the hospital like a sentence of death, but sticking to their flesh-pots 

 and alcoholic " tonics." How fruit, the chief febrifuge of nature, 

 came ever to be suspected of being the cause of pyrexial disorders, 



