REPORT ON THE LAWS OF COXTAGIOX. 79 



though not ten feet wide; and the English residents at that city 

 live in perfect security within the walls of the Pera, even while 

 the plague is raging around them*. Nor has it ever been known in 

 a single instance that fever hospitals, which were at first violently 

 opposed, and even indicted at law as dangerous nuisances, have 

 spread infection to a contiguous house. On the contrary, those 

 institutions have often cleared their immediate vicinity from 

 fever, by extinguishing solitary cases, which would otherwise 

 have multiplied rapidly in the midst of poverty and filth. It is 

 due to Dr. Haygarth to state, that in the year 1775, he first re- 

 commended the establishment of fever-wards as a practical in- 

 ference from the law of the limited sphere of contagion, of which 

 his inquiries had furnished many of the best illustrationsf. His 

 proposal was soon afterwards sanctioned by Mr. Howard, who 

 had learned, by his own experience, the limited sphere of conta- 

 gion, and the great advantages of cleanliness and ventilation in 

 suppressing the fevers of jails and hospitals. 



XXII. It has been long known that dry porous bodies, when 

 exposed to the atmosphere, increase in weight by absorbing 

 aqueous vapour. In like manner, there can be no doubt that 

 contagious vapours or emanations are absorbed by porous sub- 

 stances, and are again exhaled in an active state. Boyle remarked 

 that " amber, musk, and civet perfume some bodies, though not 

 brought into contact with them, as the same determinate disease 

 is communicable to sound persons, not only by the immediate 

 contact of one who is infected, but without itj." Contagious 

 emanations, thus imbibed by porous bodies, have received the 

 name oi fomites^. They are capable of issuing forth with 

 unabated, and, it is even asserted on good authoritj^, augmented 

 activity II . It is probable, therefore, that they are emitted in 

 a state of increased concentration, the porous body having 

 imbibed those vapours, in preference to the elastic fluids which 

 constitute the atmosphere. The propagation of contagious poi- 

 sons, in the state of fomites, is illustrated by the following among 

 numberless similar instances : — 1. The contagion of the plague 

 of 1665 was conveyed in a box of clotlies from London to Eyam, 

 a small village in Derbyshire, out of whose scanty population 

 it carried off two hundred and fifty persons**. 2. Smallpox 

 infection has been transmitted from London to Liverpool, by 

 means of new apparel made in a room where persons were sick 

 of that malady. .3. Dr. Hildebrant introduced the poison of scar- 



* Clark's Collection of Papers ; and Macniichael, Pamphleteer, xxv. 

 t Letter to Dr. Percival. % Boyle's Works, by Shaw, 4to, vol. i. 



§ The plural of fomes, fuel. || Cullen, Lind, Campbell, Clark, &c. 



•* Mead, quoted by Howard On Laxarcttos, p. 24. 



