14 CARRIERS OF INFECTION. 



We have now to speak of 



THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH INFECTIOUS 

 DISEASES SPREAD. 



THE CARRIERS OF THE INFECTION. We have seen how readily 

 infecting germs may be dispersed, wafted by the air, carried by 

 water, tainting our clothes, our money, and the commodities given 

 in exchange for it. The mutual dependence of class upon class, 

 and their unavoidable concourse, the relationships of life, as 

 well as its vicissitudes and necessities, all tend to bring people to- 

 gether in short, the entire machinery of society such as we find 

 it, is peculiarly adapted to spread infectious diseases. 



There can be little doubt that the spreading of these diseases, 

 in the majority of cases, is brought about by the healthy coming 

 into contact with the sick or convalescent. Children after an 

 attack, are allowed to go back to school too soon, and the result is 

 renewed outbreaks of scarlatina, measles, and whooping-cough. 

 The laundress disseminates the poison of scarlatina and smallpox 

 amongst her employers ; nurses carry it from sick-beds to their 

 own homes ; the tailor and dressmaker often ply their needles 

 close to fever-stricken patients. One doctor writes that he has 

 seen the garments, which were thus being made at their homes, 

 used to eke out the scanty bed-covering of a fever patient; 

 another, that he received a patient into hospital with smallpox 

 pustules on him, who had on the previous day been occupied in 

 dressing ladies' hair. I myself lately entered a house of one 

 room with eight occupants, five of whom were laid down with 

 scarlatina. In the midst of this, the father, an enfeebled man, 

 was trying to earn a little money by working at a couch which 

 ere many days would too surely carry disease into some house- 

 hold. These persons have our deepest sympathy, and if we speak 

 of their hard necessities, it is in the hope, and with the earnest 

 wish that we may be able to mitigate, or remove them. 



Let us vary the illustration by another example. The milk- 

 cans, we shall suppose, at a farm-dairy have been unwittingly 



