SANITARY RELATIONS OF THE SOIL. 339 



is exceedingly remote. It does not present itself in this light to the 

 physician who has had to deal with it. I am reminded of what the 

 chief staff physician, Dr. Port, has remarked, as if by intuition, on 

 the etiology of abdominal typhus, with immediate reference to mili- 

 tary hygiene, and its bearings on the construction of barracks and 

 camps. He says : " If we consider the danger to which the inhab- 

 itants of a disease-bearing soil are exposed by leaving their houses 

 without protection from the soil, I might say by putting them on the 

 ground barefooted, and, if we reflect that our most imposing palaces 

 labor under this partial nakedness, we must of necessity receive the 

 impression that there is some lack in our civilization. We have in this 

 respect not only not excelled the most primitive constructions of the 

 childhood of the building art, but have fallen behind them in a very 

 important matter. We have no reason, from the hygienic point of view, 

 to look down disparagingly on the pile-dwellings of some foreign races 

 and the mud huts which our peasants still live in here and there : both 

 of these classes of people, although in very different ways, have 

 respected, in building, a hygienic principle that has escaped our 

 architects. They have made their dwelling-places independent of the 

 ground, in the former case by putting under them a grating of piles 

 admitting a circulation of air ; in the latter case by isolating the hut 

 by means of a plaster floor. The superiority of these primitive 

 dwelling-houses over our modern buildings can not be made to appear 

 more clearly by any other example than by the sketch which Dr. 

 Hirsch has given of an outbreak of cholera on the estate of Ilerr von 

 Winter, chief health-officer of Dantzic : 



" Nine houses stood in a group in front of the manor-house of the 

 estate, and were inhabited by the farm-servants ; seven of them had 

 been rebuilt in timber wdth brick fillings, and furnished with cellars, 

 which were perfectly dry ; their ground-floors were lined with deal, 

 were dry, airy, and kept clean ; the manure-heaps were arranged in the 

 manner that is common in rural districts. Two of the houses in the 

 group had not been rebuilt ; they were old mud huts, with low stories, 

 without cellars ; the rooms were not boarded up, but only plastered ; 

 and their condition seemed on the w T hole much more unfavorable than 

 that of the others, while the manner of living of their inhabitants in 

 other respects was in no way different from that of their neighbors in 

 the modern cottages. About one hundred and fifty persons lived in all 

 the nine houses. A woman, suffering from an attack of cholera, was 

 taken into one of the new houses ; three days afterward the first cases 

 of sickness appeared in the neighborhood of this house, and the disease- 

 quickly spread to all the houses except the two old huts. The inmates 

 of these houses had the same intercourse with their fellow-dwellers on 

 the premises as the latter with each other ; yet, while seventeen persons 

 (or fifteen per cent of the whole number) in the seven new houses were 

 prostrated, not a case of sickness occurred in the old huts. The 



