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Bence Jones, he immediately repeated it with a silk 

 handkerchief. The result was substantially the same, 

 though, as might be expected, the wool is by far the 

 surest filter. The application of these experiments is 

 obvious. If a physician wishes to hold back from the 

 lungs of his patient, or from his own, the germs by 

 which contagious disease is said to be propagated, he 

 will employ a cotton wool respirator. After the revela- 

 tions of this evening, such respirators must, I think, 

 come into general use as a defence against contagion. 

 In the crowded dwellings of the London poor, where 

 the isolation of the sick is difficult, if not impossible, 

 the noxious air around the patient may, by this simple 

 means, be restored to practical purity. Thus filtered, 

 attendants may breathe the air unharmed. In all prob- 

 ability the protection of the lungs will be protec- 

 tion of the entire system. For it is exceedingly 

 probable that the germs which lodge in the air- 

 passages, and which, at their leisure, can work their 

 way across the mucous membrane, are those which sow 

 in the body epidemic disease. If this be so, then 

 disease can certainly be warded off by filters of cotton 

 wool. I should be most willing to test their efficacy in 

 my own person. And time will decide whether in lung 

 diseases also the woolen respirator cannot abate irrita- 

 tion, if not arrest decay. By its means, so far as the 

 germs are concerned, the air of the highest Alps may 

 be brought into the chamber of the invalid. 



