Amju°nUer;i9otrm*}     Use  of  Copper  in  Destroying  Typhoid.  265 
THE  USE  OF  COPPER'  IN  DESTROYING  TYPHOID  ORGAN- 
ISMS AND  THE  EFFECTS  OF  COPPER  ON  MAN. 
By  Henry  Kraemer. 
It  is  said  that  "  the  life  of  a  Londoner  is  worth  ten  to  fifteen 
years'  less  purchase  than  that  of  the  average  provincial.    This  fact 
is  due  to  many  causes,  but  the  chief  among  them  is  the  quality  of 
the  water."    The  same  could  be  said  of  the  residents  of  many  of 
our  American  cities.    Yet  the  necessity  for  a  pure-water  supply  has 
been  recognized  since  ancient  times,  and  enormous  sums  of  money 
have  been  and  are  being  spent  in  the  control  and  purification  of 
water  supplies.    Our  failure  to  secure  pure  water  has  been  largely 
due  to  ignorance  on  the  one  hand,  in  the  past  at  least,  and  to  mis- 
management on  the  other.  It  was  only  in  1873  that  Balfour  Stewart1 
wrote : 
It  is  only  very  recently  that  we  have  begun  to  suspect  a  large  number  of  our 
diseases  to  be  caused  by  organic  germs.  Now,  assuming  that  we  are  right  in 
this,  it  must  nevertheless  be  confessed  that  our  ignorance  about  these  germs  is 
most  complete.  It  is  perhaps  doubtful  whether  we  ever  saw  one  of  these 
organisms,  while  it  is  certain  that  we  are  in  profound  ignorance  of  their  proper- 
ties and  habits.  .  .  .  We  are  at  any  rate  intimately  bound  up  with,  and, 
so  to  speak,  at  the  mercy  of,  a  world  of  creatures,  of  which  we  know  as  little 
as  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  planet  Mars. 
Yet,  even  here,  with  profound  ignorance  of  the  individual,  we  are  not  alto- 
gether unacquainted  with  some  of  the  life  habits  of  these  powerful  predatory 
communities.  Thus  we  know  that  cholera  is  eminently  a  low-level  disease, 
and  that  during  its  ravages  we  ought  to  pay  particular  attention  to  the  water 
we  drink.  This  is  a  general  law  of  cholera,  which  is  of  the  more  importance 
to  us  because  we  cannot  study  the  habits  of  the  individual  organisms  that  cause 
the  disease. 
Could  we  but  see  these,  and  experiment  upon  them,  we  should  soon  acquire 
a  much  more  extensive  knowledge  of  their  habits,  and  perhaps  find  out  the 
means  of  extirpating  the  disease,  and  of  preventing  its  recurrence. 
During  the  past  thirty  years,  since  Balfour  Stewart  wrote  these 
lines,  the  whole  subject  of  bacteriology  has  been  developed  and  a 
distinct  science  has  been  created.  In  many  industries  bacteriologists 
are  regularly  employed  to  study  the  problems  connected  with  them 
and  to  apply  the  results  so  obtained.  In  those  industries  which  are 
in  the  hands  of  progressive  private  individuals  and  corporations,  as 
of  brewing,  every  scientific  fact  is  considered  on  its  merits  and  util- 
ized if  found  applicable.    On  the  other  hand,  the  purification  of 
1  "The  Conservation  of  Energy."    Chapter  I.    (August,  1873.) 
