ON DEODORIZATION AND DISINFECTION. 
457 
still remain some infectious principle, but in a degree much less 
intense, so that — to take a crowded typhus ward — instead of many 
visitors to it being attacked, and this with a severe form of the 
disease, only a few are attacked, and that slightly. 
We may also theorize on the effect of the fluid on the patients 
themselves. We suppose, for example, a person has received one 
dose of infection, giving him typhus fever; he then comes into a 
crowded typhus ward, where he and the others are constantly 
emitting infectious miasm from their lungs and the surface of their 
bodies; this is respired by them over and over again, so that 
instead of there being one, there are two chances against them ; 
instead of the original quantity of infection to which they were 
exposed, they continue to inhale additional doses of it during their 
illness ; now, if by using the fluid we wholly, or even only partly, 
remove the typhous principle in the air, we are giving them a 
better chance of recovery.* Likewise, during convalescence, if 
the air in the ward be tolerably pure, the digestion and appetite of 
the patients improve much more rapidly than if the atmosphere be 
foul ; their strength returns more quickly, and their convalescence 
is much shorter ; they run less chance of a relapse, and the hospi- 
tal gains their beds to accommodate new patients. 
By using the fluid, the medical attendants, students, and nurses, 
are either protected from infection, or at least run much less risk 
of being taken ill. 
If we had a fever hospital, throughout the whole of which the 
fluid was daily used, and if physicians, students, and nurses, who 
had not had typhus, continued for four or five months to visit 
without being taken ill, this might be considered a proof that the 
fluid perfectly destroyed infection. To use the fluid in part of the 
hospital only would not be sufficient, as air from non-fluidized 
wards might be admitted, or the nurses might be visiting these, 
and be there infected. In the past season I had not an opportu- 
nity of making a trial like the above, as, generally speaking, the 
physicians and nurses had already had fever. 
In the autumn of 1847, in the Quebec Marine and Emigrant 
Hospital, I had the fluid used (latterly) in seventeen wards and 
sheds containing 317 patients (being about a third of the whole 
number in the hospital), of whom about two-thirds were ill of 
typhus, and the remainder of dysentery. When 1 began visiting 
them, these wards were the worst in the hospital for ventilation, 
&c. ; half of them were in the stone building ; in other respects 
* In different hospitals in Ireland, it was found by Mr. Cronin, Dr. Lindsay, 
and Mr. Drummond, that the mortality became less after they began to use 
the chloride of zinc solution. — See Report on the Solution of Chloride of Zinc, 
VOL. XXI. 3 Q 
