PRin'ARATom' TO Risi:ar(H (]ari;i:r 43 



From February 28 until March 1, 1882, a Sanitary Convention 

 had been held at Aim Arbor. This was presided over by the 

 Michii^an jurist, Thomas M. Cooley; and the secretary of the 

 convention was Dr. Victor C. Vaughan, a graduate of the Univer- 

 sity of Michigan's medical department and later to be its dean. 

 Not yet had Dr. \'aughan been made a full professor of hygiene 

 and physiological chemistry at the University; and not yet had he 

 gone aboard to study, and come under the influence of, among 

 others. Max von Pettenkofer. " No king ever did for Munich and 

 Bavaria what this model scientist did," Vaughan wrote ^- of von 

 'Pettenkofer. 



About the middle of the nineteenth century Munich was a hotbed of 

 typhoid fever. From 1857 to 1867 the annual death rate from this disease 

 in that city averaged two hundred and three per one hundred thousand. 

 The city was honeycombed with privy vaults and shallow wells. The 

 contents of the former leaked into the latter, from which the people drank. 

 About the later date there came to this city a young, intelligent epidemiol- 

 ogist, one of the first of his kind, by the name of Pettenkoffer. He induced 

 the people to abandon their privy vaults and cesspools, to build a system 

 of sewers and to bring a pure water supply from a mountain lake. By 

 these means the prevalence of typhoid fever was within a few years 

 reduced to almost zero. 



Erwin Smith has described ^^ the North American and European 

 situation in epidemic diseases prior to 1876 thus: 



Typhus fever, typhoid fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis, cholera, 

 yellow fever, and the plague destroyed hundreds of thousands of persons 

 every year, and the causes were not known and there were no remedies. 

 There was a shot-gun quarantine and disinfection of clothing (now known 

 to be useless) for yellow fever, and with stenches in the houses there 

 were prayers in the churches against yellow fever, cholera, and other 

 epidemics. Malarial fever destroyed or invalided multitudes of persons 

 every year and rendered a large part of the tropics uninhabitable to the 

 white man, and nothing was known as to its cause or as to how it was 

 contracted. Many supposed it was due to breathing night air. Following 

 Pettenkofer, the cause of typhoid fever was supposed to be a miasm in 

 some way related to the depth of the ground water. No one suspected that 

 deadly diseases could be transmitted by flies, mosquitoes, ticks, bedbugs, 

 fleas, lice, cats, rats, rabbits, goats, antelopes, and other animals, or that 

 an apparently healthy human being (one recovered from a disease) could 

 remain the carrier of its germs deadly to another. Such ideas were all 



'"A doctor's memories, 152, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1926. 

 ''Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 15-16 (address given in 1926). 



