72 MICROBES AND THE MICROBE-KILLER. 



are applied to timber do we submit meat to the effects 

 of wood smoke. This permeates the substance, kills 

 microbes, and of course prevents their development. It 

 would indeed be easy to cite thousands of cases where 

 applications of a more or less poisonous character are 

 used, which would kill not only microbes but every liv- 

 ing thing, whether animal or vegetable. The embalming 

 of bodies, now so fashionable, is nothing more than a 

 use of poisonous solutions calculated to prevent the pro- 

 cess of decomposition or fermentation, and many of the 

 so-called remedies used by physicians to treat disease 

 are likewise of a highly poisonous character. Some- 

 times what seem to be simple and harmless remedies 

 are not so. An Italian physician has recently suggested 

 the use of sulphur in the treatment of typhoid fever, but 

 in enormous doses frequently repeated. He would also 

 cover the patient and the bedclothes with sulphur, and, 

 to the ordinary reader, this may seem a very innocent 

 remedy. But chemical changes take place, and the 

 well-known yellow powder is converted into very ener- 

 getic compounds, and it then becomes a question 

 whether the microbes or the patient will die first. That 

 is all. Again, many of the compounds advertised for 

 popular application are extremely dangerous, and too 

 much caution cannot be exercised in their use, though 

 people who are wise will leave such things alone alto- 

 gether and fall back upon those only which are known 

 not to be injurious. 



The pharmacist may look with pride upon his well- 

 filled shelves, where arsenic and corrosive sublimate 

 stand side by side with morphia, carbolic acid, lauda- 

 num, nux vomica, chloral, creosote, chloroform, and a 

 host of similar preparations, all of which are used by 

 physicians to kill microbes, or, as they say, to cure dis- 

 ease. And these things do kill microbes, but not until 

 the blood and the tissues are saturated with them, and 

 then the effect is not for a day but forever. No one 

 denies that we can kill microbes in the human system 

 by soaking the body with poisonous substances, just as 



