50 



and Typhoid have each their distinctive periods of duration, 

 rash, symptoms, and probably causation. Typhoid Fever is 

 essentially a drain fever, and may be caused or excited by 

 drinking impure water or inhalation of impure air. Most 

 people hold that the specific Typhoid poison cannot be gene- 

 rated de novo. I hold most positively that it can, and not 

 only it, but every individual kind of fever poison. Such is 

 not the rule, but the exceptions are so numerous and well 

 marked as to leave no doubt that certain conditions of 

 putrefactive decay or decomposition give, as their resultant, 

 certain definite specific fever poisons. As it may be said 

 this is a matter for the curious rather than for the practical, 

 I will leave it as it stands. All however agree that tainted 

 water and tainted air may and do predispose to or excite 

 attacks of Typhoid and other fevers, and that they are both 

 pregnant sources of blood-poisoning. It is also agreed that 

 " even a fractional contamination of the air of a sleeping- 

 room with sewer gas is almost certain to produce disease 

 sooner or later." 



Yet notwithstanding the universal testimony of medical 

 men of common sense and observation that sewer gas is so 

 fatal in its results, we have, as a sequence on our advance in 

 domestic civilisation, so constructed our houses, our sewers, 

 and our drains that our living rooms and the rooms in 

 which our food is cooked, dressed, or stored, are par excel- 

 lence the receptacles of tainted air. It is to this frightful 

 state of things that I would call your special attention. 



We have in our towns main and minor sewers. These 

 are too often not sewers but cesspools, and if cesspools, of 

 course generators of sewer gases. As a rule these sewers 

 have been laid piecemeal without any reference to a definite 

 o-eneral system. The existence of a river has liad the effect 

 of determining the direction of sewers quite independently 

 of any sanitary considerations. All relating to the direc- 

 tion, Szc, of sewers, ought to be decided without any reference 



