INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 37 



may be of less moment than those which spring from our own 

 misdoings. Our own misdoings are not the great causes at work 

 here, or it would no doubt be worse for us. We speak of those 

 causes which produce the infectious diseases, of which, as we know, 

 the visitations are sometimes very destructive. They possess in 

 various degrees the power of passing from one person to another, 

 and this power they owe to the agency of certain vegetable spores or 

 "disease germs," which entering the body and increasing at the ex- 

 pense of its fluids, produce more or less disorganization of these, 

 and as a result, morbid processes which obtain certain specific names 

 as diseases. 



The medium in which for the most part, those "germs" find 

 themselves at home is water ; both in its fluid and in its vapour form, 

 it seems to be their habitat. In vapour they flourish abundantly, 

 especially if it is not disturbed, and so we may suppose that 

 if the vapour approaches the precipitation point in certain 

 localities, that is, if those places are damp, there " germs" abound. 

 They seem to multiply like all objectionable vegetable life in still, 

 moist and warm places. The experience of the unwholesomeness of 

 damp situations is universal, but with all our experience it is doubful 

 if we duly appreciate the power of such situations to produce mis- 

 chief. For example, there is no disease from which we suffer so 

 much as from consumption. We have long been in the habit of re- 

 garding this as a complaint due to heredity. For some time past the 

 origin of consumption, in this way exclusively, has been questioned. 

 It has been told us by trustworthy observers, that the disease has 

 been known to originate and prevail with great intensity in localities 

 in which there was, from any cause, a moist condition of the, earth, 

 such as a stiff impermiable clay, and that removal from such locality 

 has been followed by happy results to suffering families. Many 

 physicians who have made their observations in country places have 

 adopted the theory that a cold, sour, damp soil, and exhalations 

 thence arising produced consumption without heredity. With pro- 

 fessional caution they did not say how it arose in those localities. On 

 the other hand, physicians whose experience has been obtained in 

 large towns were disposed to hold the opinion broached by Sir John 

 Rose Cormac, a Scottish physician resident in France, that the dis- 

 ease arose from the breathing over and over again the same 



