Dr Stark on the Influence of Colour an Odours. 97 

 burgh owes much of the mildness of its attack to the white- 

 washing of its steep and narrow lanes and closes, the walls of the 

 common-stairs, and most of the hovels inhabited by the lowest 

 classes of the community, — not to the partial fumigations and 

 sprinklings with chloride of lime, which the first breath of wind 

 carried off. The white-wasliing of the walls prevented them 

 from absorbing the deleterious emanations, and the currents of air 

 were thus enabled to sweep them away, before they had accumu- 

 lated to such a degree as to become an active source of disease. 



Next, therefore, to keeping the walls of hospitals, prisons, or 

 apartments occupied by a number of individuals, of a white 

 colour, I should suggest that the bedsteads, tables, seats, &c. 

 should be painted white, and that the dresses of the nurses and 

 hospital attendants should be of a light colour. A regulation 

 of this kind would possess the double advantage of enabhng 

 cleanliness to be enforced, at the same time that it presented 

 the least absorbent surface to the emanations of disease. 



On the same principle it would appear that physicians and 

 others by dressing in blacky have unluckily chosen the colour of 

 all others most absorbent of odorous and other exhalations, and 

 of course the most dangerous to themselves and patients. Facts 

 have been mentioned which make it next to certain, that con- 

 tagious diseases may be communicated to a third person through 

 the medium of one who has been exposed to contagion, but 

 himself not affected * ; and in fact the circumstance of infec- 

 tious effluvia being capable of being carried by medical men 

 from one patient to another, I should conceive one of the means 

 by which such diseases are propagated in the ill-ventilated and 

 dirty habitations of the poor exposed to their influence. 



Even in my own very limited experience, I think I have ob- 

 served some melancholy instances of the effect of black dress in 

 absorbing the hurtful emanations of fever patients in a pubHc 

 hospital ; and many facts are incidentally noticed by medical 

 writers and referred to other causes, which I should not hesitate 

 to ascribe chiefly to exposure of this nature. Not to mention 

 individual cases, in the Sessions held at Oxford in July 1577, 

 " there arose amidst the people such a damp that almost all 



• See Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen, by Alex- 

 ander Gordon, M. D. liOnd. 1 796, p. 63-4. 



VOf.. XVII. NO. XXXIII. JULY 1834. G 



