Y* Thirteenth Communication from Dr. Thornton. 



to your workshops. Keep the windows of your workshops 

 open whenever the weather is not insupportably cold. I 

 have no interest in giving you this advice. Remember what 

 I, your countryman, and a phvsician, tell you. If you 

 would not bring infection and disease upon yourselves, and 

 to your wives and little ones, change the air you breathe, 

 change it many times in a day, by opening your win- 

 dows." 



2. Pure air is the antidote against infection. 



This is shown from the performance of quarantine. 



3. The adinission of the purest air is of inlinitc gervice 

 in fevers. 



I have often heard Mr. Aberncthy, a gentleman of the 

 strongest natural sense and most refined intellect, speak with 

 rapture on the benehts he perceived in putrid fever from his 

 patients being placed in different currents of air. " I have 

 always," says the great Dr. Lind, " observed the benefits 

 resulting to the sick in fevers, when removed from the cal/m 

 of ships to the better air of Haslar hospital. I have even 

 been informed by a credible practitioner, long resident in 

 Jamaica, that he had frequently seen the poor seamen in 

 the merchants' service to recover from the worst putrid fe- 

 vers, even the yellow fever, solely by having the benefit of 

 a free and constant admission of the pure sea air into a 

 ship anchored at a distance from the shore, where they lay 

 utterly destitute of every assistance in sickness, and even of 

 common necessaries, having nothing but cold water to 

 drink, and not so much as abed to lie on ; while gentlemen, 

 on the contrary, shut up in small, close, and unventilated 

 chambers, at Kingston, or Portroyal, expired with their 

 whole mass of blood dissolved, flowing from every pore ; 

 the bad vitiated air of their room having produced a state of 

 universal putrefaction in the body even before death." 



Upon my lamenting, when a student of Guy's hospital, 

 to my learned instructor, Dr. Saunders, that it seemed a 

 cruelty to remove patients in putrid fever, apparentlv dying, 

 he replied, "I haveever seen that the coming over London 

 bridge has done them infinite service." 



4. It appears, that vital air, or some of its combinations, 

 diffused in fever wards, might banish the infection and also 

 cure this disease. 



A Fumigation Poii'der. — ^Nitre four pounds ; sulphur two 

 pounds; southernwood, juniper berries, of each three 

 pounds ; tar and myrrh a pound and a half. This was tried 

 at Moscow in i770, and ten male^ctore under sentence 

 of death were fumigated well with this in the Lazaretto, 



and 



