Not only have most diseases a living cause, and a consequent natural history and course, but they have a special method of attack, which looks almost like a preference. It seems little wonder that the terror-stricken imagination of our Stone Age ancestors should have personified them as demons, "attacking" or leaping upon their victims and "seizing" them with malevolent delight. The concrete comparison was ready to their hand in the attack of fierce beasts of prey; and as the tiger leaps for the head to break the neck with one stroke of his paw, the wildcat flies at the face, the wolf springs for the slack of the flank or the hamstring, so these different disease demons appear each to have its favorite point of attack: smallpox, the skin; cholera, the bowels; the Black Death, the armpits and the groin; and pneumonia, the lung.
There are probably few diseases which are so clearly recognized by every one and about which popular impressions are in the main so clear-cut and so correct as pneumonia. The stabbing pain in the chest, the cough, the rusty or blood-stained expectoration, the rapid breathing, all stamp it unmistakably as a disease of the lung. Its furious onset with a teeth-chattering chill, followed by a high fever and flushed face, and itsrapid course toward recovery or death, mark it off sharply from all other lung infections.
Its popular names of "lung fever," "lung plague," "congestion of the lungs," are as graphic and distinctive as anything that medical science has invented. In fact, our most universally accepted term for it, pneumonia, is merely the Greek equivalent of the first of these.
It is remarkable how many of our disease-enemies appear to have a preference for the lung as a point of attack. In the language ofOld Man Meansin "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," the lung is "their fav'rit holt." Our deadliest diseases are lung diseases, headed by consumption, seconded by pneumonia, and followed by bronchitis, asthma, etc.; together, they manage to account for one-fourth to one-third of all the deaths that occur in a community, young or old. No other great organ or system of the body is responsible for more than half such a mortality. Now this bad eminence has long been a puzzle, since, foul as is the air or irritating as is the gas or dust that we may breathe into our lungs, they cannot compare for a moment with the awful concoctions in the shape of food which are loaded into our stomachs. Even from the point of view of infections, food is at least as likely to be contaminated with disease-germs as air is. Yet there is no disease or combination of diseases of the whole food canal which has half the mortality of consumption alone, in civilized communities, while in the Orient the pneumonic form of the plague is a greater scourge than cholera.
It has even been suggested that there may possiblybe a historic or ancestral reason for this weakness to attack, and one dating clear back to the days of the mud-fish. It is pointed out that the lung is the last of our great organs to develop, inasmuch as over half of our family tree is under water. When our mud-loving ancestor, the lung-fish (who was probably "one of three brothers" who came over in the Mayflower—the records have not been kept) began to crawl out on the tide-flats, he had every organ that he needed for land-life in excellent working condition and a fair degree of complexity: brain, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys; but he had to manufacture a lung, which he proceeded to do out of an old swim-bladder. This, of course, was several years ago. But the lung has not quite caught up yet. The two or three million year lead of the other organs was too much to be overcome all at once. So carelessly and hastily was this impromptu lung rigged up that it was allowed to open from the front of the gullet or œsophagus, instead of the back, while the upper part of the mouth was cut off for its intake tube, as we have already seen in considering adenoids, thus making every mouthful swallowed cut right across the air-passages, which had to be provided with a special valve-trap (the epiglottis) to prevent food from falling into the lungs.
So, whenever you choke at table, you have a right to call down a benediction upon the soul of your long departed ancestor, the lung-fish. However applicable or remote we may regard "the bearin's of this observation," the practical and most undesirable fact confronts us to-day that this crossing and mutual interference ofthe air and the food-passages is a fertile cause of pneumonia, inasmuch as the germs of this disease have their habitat in the mouth, and are from that lurking-place probably inhaled into the lung, as is also the case with the germs of several milder bronchitic and catarrhal affections.
It may be also pointed out that, history apart, our lung-cells at the present day are at another disadvantage as compared with all the other cells of the body, except those of the skin; and that is, that they are in constant contact with air, instead of being submerged in water. Ninety-five per cent of our body-cells are still aquatic in their habits, and marine at that, and can live only saturated with, and bathed in, warm saline solution. Dry them, or even half-dry them, and they die. Even the pavement-cells coating our skin surfaces are practically dead before they reach the air, and are shed off daily in showers.
We speak of ourselves as "land animals," but it is only our lungs that are really so. All the rest of the body is still made up of sea creatures. It is little wonder that our lungs should pay the heaviest penalty of our change from the warm and equable sea water to the gusty and changeable air.
Even if we have set down the lung as a point of the least resistance in the body, we have by no means thereby explained its diseases. Our point of view has distinctly shifted in this respect within recent years. Twenty years ago pathologists were practically content with tracing a case of illness or death to an inflammation or disease of some particular organ, like the heart,the kidney, the lung, or the stomach. Now, however, we are coming to see that not only may the causation of this heart disease, kidney disease, lung disease, have lain somewhere entirely outside of the heart, kidney, or lung, but that, as a rule, the entire body is affected by the disease, which simply expresses itself more violently, focuses, as it were, in this particular organ. In other words, diseases of definite organs are most commonly the local expressions of general diseases or infections; and this local aggravation of the disease would never have occurred if the general resisting power and vigor of the entire body had not been depressed below par. So that even in guarding against or curing a disease of a particular organ it is necessary to consider and to treat the whole body.
Nowhere is this new attitude better illustrated than in pneumonia. Frank and unquestioned infection as it is, wreaking two-thirds of its visible damage in the lung itself, the liability to its occurrence and the outlook for its cure depend almost wholly upon the general vigor and rallying power of the entire body. It is perfectly idle to endeavor to avoid it by measures directed toward the protection of the lung or of the air-passages, and equally futile to attempt to arrest its course by treatment directed to the lung, or even the chest. The best place to wear a chest-protector is on the soles of the feet, and poulticing the chest for pneumonia is about as effective as shampooing the scalp for brain-fag.
This clears the ground of a good many ancient misconceptions; for instance, that the chief cause ofpneumonia is direct exposure to cold or a wetting, or the inhalation of raw, cold air. Few beliefs were more firmly fixed in the popular mind—and, for the matter of that, in the medical—up to fifteen or twenty years ago. It has found its way into literature; and the hero of the shipwreck in an icy gale or of weeks of wandering in the Frozen North, who must be offered up for artistic reasons as a sacrifice to the plot, invariably dies a victim of pneumonia, from his "frightful exposure," just as the victim of disappointed love dies of "a broken heart," or the man who sees the ambitions of years come crashing about his ears, or the woman who has lost all that makes life worth living, invariably develops "brain fever."
There is a physical basis for all of these standard catastrophes, but it is much slenderer than is usually supposed. For instance, almost every one can tell you how friends of theirs have "brought on congestion of the lungs," or pneumonia, by going without an overcoat on a winter day, or breaking through the ice when skating, or even by getting their feet wet and not changing their stockings; and this single dramatic instance has firmly convinced them that the chief cause of "lung fever" is a chill or a wetting. Yet when we come to tabulate long series of causes, rising into thousands, we find that the percentage in which even the patients themselves attribute the disease to exposure, or a chill, sinks to a surprisingly small amount. For instance, in the largest series collected with this point in mind, that of Musser and Norris, out of forty-two hundred cases only seventeen per cent gave a history of exposureand "catching cold"; and the smaller series range from ten to fifteen per cent. So that, even in the face of the returns, not more than one-fifth of all cases of pneumonia can reasonably be attributed to chill. And when we further remember that under this heading of exposure and "catching cold" are included many mere coincidences and the chilly sensations attending the beginning of those milder infections which we term "common colds," it is probable that even this small percentage could be reduced one-half. Indeed, most cautious investigators of the question have expressed themselves to this effect. This harmonizes with a number of obstinate facts which have long proved stumbling-blocks in the way of the theory of exposure as a cause of pneumonia. One of the classic ones was that, during Napoleon's frightful retreat from Moscow in the dead of winter, while his wretched soldiers died by thousands of frost-bite and starvation, exceedingly little pneumonia developed among them. Another was that, as we have already seen with colds, instead of being commoner and more frequent in the extreme Northern climate and on the borders of the Arctic Zone, pneumonia is almost unknown there. Of course, given the presence of the germ, prolonged exposure to cold may depress the vital powers sufficiently to permit an attack to develop.
Again, the ages at which pneumonia is both most common and most deadly, namely, under five and over sixty-five, are precisely those at which this feature of exposure to the weather plays the most insignificant part. Last and most conclusive of all, since definite statisticshave begun to be kept upon a large scale, pneumonia has been found to be emphatically a disease of cities, instead of country districts. Even under the favorable conditions existing in the United States, for instance, the death-rate per hundred thousand living, according to the last census, was in the cities two hundred and thirty-three, and for the country districts one hundred and thirty-five,—in other words, nearly seventy per cent greater in city populations.
How, then, did the impression become so widely spread and so firmly rooted that pneumonia is chiefly due to exposure? Two things, I think, will explain most of this. One is, that the disease is most common in the winter-time, the other, that like all febrile diseases it most frequently begins with sensations of chilliness, varying all the way from a light shiver to a violent chill, orrigor. The savage, bone-freezing, teeth-rattling chill which ushers in an attack of pneumonia is one of the most striking characteristics of the disease, and occurs in twenty-five to fifty per cent of all cases.
Its chief occurrence in the winter-time is an equally well-known and undisputed fact, and it has been for centuries set down in medical works as one of the diseases chiefly due to changes in temperature, humidity, and directions of the wind. Years of research have been expended in order to trace the relations between the different factors in the weather and the occurrence of pneumonia, and volumes, yes, whole libraries, published, pointing out how each one of these factors, the temperature, humidity, direction of wind, barometricpressure, and electric tension, is in succession the principal cause of the spread of this plague. Many interesting coincidences were shown. But one thing always puzzled us, and that was, that the heaviest mortality usually occurred, not just at the beginning of winter, when the shock of the cold would be severest, nor even in the months of lowest temperature, like December or January, but in the late winter and the early spring. Throughout the greater part of the temperate zone the death-rate for pneumonia begins to rise in December, increases in January, goes higher still in February, reaching its climax in that month or in March. April is almost as bad, and the decline often doesn't fairly set in until May.
No better illustration could probably be given of the danger of drawing conclusions when you are not in possession of all the facts. One thing was entirely overlooked in all this speculation until about twenty years ago,—that pneumonia was due not simply to the depressing effects of cold, but to a specific germ, the pneumococcus of Fraenkel. This threw an entirely new light upon our elaborate weather-causation theories. And while these still hold the field by weight of authority and that mental inertia which we term conservatism, yet the more thoughtful physicians and pathologists are now coming to regard these factors as chiefly important according to the extent to which we are crowded together in often badly lighted and ill-ventilated houses and rooms, with the windows and doors shut to save fuel, thus affording a magnificent hothouse hatching-ground for such germs as may be present, and idealfacilities for their communication from one victim to another. At the same time, by this crowding and the cutting off of life and exercise in the open air which accompanies it, the resisting power of our bodies is lowered. And when these two processes have had an opportunity of progressing side by side for from two to three months; when, in other words, the soil has been carefully prepared, the seed sown, and the moist heat applied as in a forcing-house, then we suddenly reap the harvest. In other words, the heavy crop of pneumonia in January, February, and March is the logical result of the seed-sowing and forcing of the preceding two or three months.
The warmth of summer is even more depressing in its immediate effects than the cold of winter, but the heat carries with it one blessing, in that it drives us, willy-nilly, into the open air, day and night. And on looking at statistics we find precisely what might have been expected on this theory, that the death-rate for pneumonia is lowest in July and August.
It might be said in passing that, in spite of our vivid dread of sunstroke, of cholera, and of pestilence in hot weather, the hot months of the year in temperate climates are invariably the months of fewest diseases and fewest deaths. Our extraordinary dread of the summer heat has but slender rational physical basis. It may be but a subconscious after-vibration in our brain cells from the simoons, the choleras, and the pestilences of our tropical origin as a race. Open air, whether hot, cold, wet, dry, windy, or still, is our best friend, and house air our deadliest enemy.
If this view be well founded, then the advance of modern civilization would tend to furnish a more and more favorable soil for the spread of this disease. This, unfortunately, is about the conclusion to which we are being most unwillingly driven. Almost every other known infectious disease is diminishing, both in frequency and in fatality, under civilization. Pneumonia alone defies our onslaughts. In fact, if statistics are to be taken at their surface-value, we are facing the appalling situation of an apparently marked increase both in its prevalence and in its mortality. For a number of years past, ever since, in fact, accurate statistics began to be kept, pneumonia has been listed as the second heaviest cause of death, its only superior being tuberculosis.
About ten years ago it began to be noticed that the second competitor in the race of death was overtaking its leader, and this ghastly rivalry continued until about three years ago pneumonia forged ahead. In some great American cities it now occupies the bad eminence of the most fatal single disease on the death-lists.
The situation is, however, far from being as serious and alarming as it might appear, simply from this bald statement of statistics. First of all, because the forging ahead of pneumonia has been due in greater degree to the falling behind of tuberculosis than to any actual advance on its part. The death-rate of tuberculosis within the last thirty years has diminished between thirty and forty per cent; and pneumonia at its worst has never yet equaled the old fatality of tuberculosis. Furthermore, all who have carefully studied the subjectare convinced that much of this apparent increase is due to more accurate and careful diagnosis. Up to ten years or so ago it was generally believed that pneumonia was rare in young children. Now, however, that we make the diagnosis with a microscope, we discover that a large percentage of the cases of capillary bronchitis, broncho-pneumonia, and acute congestion of the lung in children are due to the presence of the pneumococcus. Similarly, at the other end of the line, deaths that were put down to bronchitis, asthma, heart failure, yes, even to old age, have now been shown on bacteriological examination to be due to this ubiquitous imp of malevolence; so that, on the whole, all that we are probably justified in saying is that pneumonia is not decreasing under civilization. This is not to be wondered at, inasmuch as the inevitable crowding and congestion which accompanies civilization, especially in its derivative sense of "citification," tends to foster it in every way, both by multiplying the opportunities for infection and lowering the resisting power of the crowded masses.
Moreover, it was only in the last ten years, yes, within the last five years, that we fairly grasped the real method and nature of the spread of the disease, and recognized the means that must be adopted against it. And as all of these factors are matters which are not only absolutely within our own control, but are included in that programme of general betterment of human comfort and vigor to which the truest intelligence and philanthropy of the nation are now being directed, the outlook for the future, instead of being gloomy, is distinctly encouraging.
Our chief difficulty in discovering the cause of pneumonia lay in the swarm of applicants for the honor. Almost every self-respecting bacteriologist seemed to think it his duty to discover at least one, and the abundance and variety of germs constantly or accidentally present in the human saliva made it so difficult positively to isolate the real criminal that, although it was identified and described as long ago as 1884 by Fraenkel, the validity of its claim was not generally recognized and established until nearly ten years later.
It is a tiny, inoffensive-looking little organism, of an oval or lance-head shape, which, after masquerading under as many aliases as a confidence man, has finally come to be called the pneumococcus, for short, or "lung germ." Though by those who are more precise it is still known as theDiplococcus pneumoniæorDiplococcus lanceolatus, from its faculty of usually appearing in pairs, and from its lance-like shape. Its conduct abounds in "ways that are dark and tricks that are vain," whose elucidation throws a flood of light upon a number of interesting problems in the spread of disease.
First of all, it literally fulfills the prognostic of Scripture, that "a man's foes shall be they of his own household," for its chosen abiding place and normal habitat is no less intimate a place than the human mouth. Outside of this warm and sheltering fold it perishes quickly, as cold, sunlight, and dryness are alike fatal to it.
We could hardly believe the evidence of our senses when studies of the saliva of perfectly healthy individuals showed this deadly little bacillus to be presentin considerable numbers in from fifteen to forty-five per cent of the cases examined. Why, then, does not every one develop pneumonia? The answer to this strikes the keynote of our modern knowledge of infectious disease, namely, that while an invading germ is necessary, a certain breaking down of the body defenses and a lowering of the vital resistance are equally necessary. These invaders lie in wait at the very gates of the citadel, below the muzzles of our guns, as it were, waiting for some slackening of discipline or of watchfulness to rush in and put the fortress to sack. Nowhere is this more strikingly true than in pneumonia. It is emphatically a disease where, in the language of the brilliant pathologist-philosopher Moxon, "While it is most important to know what kind of a disease the patient has got, it is even more important to know what kind of a patient the disease has got."
The death-rate in pneumonia is an almost mathematically accurate deduction from the age, vigor, and nutrition of the patient attacked. No other disease has such a brutal and inveterate habit of killing the weaklings. The half-stifled baby in the tenement, the underfed, overworked laboring man, the old man with rigid arteries and stiffening muscles or waning life vigor, the chronic sufferer from malnutrition, alcoholism, Bright's disease, heart disease—theseare its chosen victims.
Another interesting feature about the pneumococcus is its vitality outside of the body. If the saliva in which it is contained be kept moist, and not exposed to the direct sunlight and in a fairly warm place, it may survive as long as two weeks. If dried, but kept in thedark, it will survive four hours. If exposed to sunlight, or even diffuse daylight, it dies within an hour. In other words, under the conditions of dampness and darkness which often prevail in crowded tenements it may remain alive and malignant for weeks; in decently lighted and ventilated rooms, less than two hours. This explains why, in private practice and under civilized conditions, epidemics of this admittedly infectious disease are rare; while in jails, overcrowded barracks, prison ships, and winter camps of armies in the field they are by no means uncommon. This is vividly supported by the fact brought out in our later investigations of the sputum of slum-dwellers, carried out by city boards of health, that the percentage of individuals harboring the pneumococcus steadily increases all through the winter months, from ten per cent in December to forty-five, fifty, and even sixty per cent in February and March. The old proverb, "When want comes in at the door, Love flies out at the window," might be revised to read, "When sunlight comes in at the window the pneumococcus flies 'up the flue.'"
Authorities are still divided as to the meaning and even the precise frequency of the occurrence of the pneumococcus in the healthy human mouth. Some hold that its presence is due to recent infection which has either been unable to gain entrance to the system or is preparing its attack; others, that it is a survival from some previous mild attack of the disease, and the body tissues having acquired immunity against it, it remains in them as a harmless parasite, as is nowwell known to be the case with the germs of several of our infectious diseases—for instance, typhoid—for months and even years afterward. Others hold the highly suggestive view that it is a normal inhabitant of the healthy mouth, which can become injurious to the body, orpathogenic, only under certain depressed or disturbed conditions of the latter. In defense of this last it may be pointed out that dental bacteriologists have now already isolated and described some thirty different forms of organisms which inhabit the mouth and teeth; and the pneumococcus may well be one of these. Further, that a number of our most dangerous disease germs, like the typhoid bacillus, the bacillus of tuberculosis, and the bacillus of diphtheria, have almost perfect "doubles," law-abiding relatives, so to speak, among the germs that normally inhabit our throats, our intestines, or our immediate surroundings. The ultimate foundation question of the science of bacteriology is, How did the disease germs become disease germs? But the question is still unanswered.
However, fortunately, here, as in other human affairs, imperfect as our knowledge is, it is sufficient to serve as a guide for practical conduct. Widely present as the pneumococcus is, we know well that it is powerless for harm except in unhealthful surroundings. There is another interesting feature of its life history which is of practical importance, and that is, like many other bacilli it is increased in virulence and infectiousness by passing through the body of a patient. Flushed with victory over a weakened subject, it acquires courage to attack a stronger. This is the reason why,in those comparatively infrequent instances in which pneumonia runs through a family, it is the strongest and most vigorous members of the family who are the last to be attacked. It also explains one of the paradoxes of this disease, that, while emphatically a disease of overcrowding and foul air, and attacking chiefly weakened individuals, it is a veritable scourge of camps, whether mining or military. When once three or four cases of pneumonia have occurred in a mining camp, even though this consist almost exclusively of vigorous men, most of them in the prime of life, it acquires a virulence like that of a pestilence, so that, while ordinarily not more than fifteen to twenty per cent of those attacked die, death-rates of forty, fifty, and even seventy per cent are by no means uncommon in mining camps. The fury and swiftness of this "miners' pneumonia" is equally incredible. Strong, vigorous men are taken with a chill while working in their sluicing ditches, are delirious before night, and die within forty-eight hours. So widely known are these facts, and so dreaded is the disease throughout the Far West and in mountain regions generally, that there is a widespread belief that pneumonia at high altitudes is particularly deadly.
I had occasion to interest myself in this question some years ago, and by writing to colleagues practicing at high elevations and collecting reports from the literature, especially of the surgeons of army posts in mountain regions, was somewhat surprised to find that the mortality of all cases occurring above five thousand feet elevation was almost identical with that of a similarclass of the population at sea-level. It is only when a sufficient number of cases occur in succession to raise the virulence of the pneumococcus in this curious manner that an epidemic with high fatality develops.
That this increase in virulence in the organism does occur was clearly demonstrated by a bacteriologist friend of mine, who succeeded in securing some of the sputum from a fatal case in the famous Tonopah epidemic of some years ago, an epidemic so fatal that it was locally known as the "Black Death." Upon injecting cultures from this sputum into guinea-pigs, the latter died in one-quarter of the time that it usually took them to succumb to a similar dose of an ordinary culture of the pneumococcus.
It is therefore evident that just as "no chain is stronger than its weakest link," so in the broad sense no community is stronger than its weakest group of individuals, and pneumonia, like other epidemics, may be well described as the vengeance which the "submerged tenth" may wreak from time to time upon their more fortunate brethren.
Now that we know that under decent and civilized conditions of light and ventilation the pneumococcus will live but an hour to an hour and a half, this reduces the risk of direct infection under these conditions to a minimum. It is obvious that the principal factors in the control of the disease are those which tend to build up the vigor and resisting power of all possible victims. The more broadly we study the disease the more clearly do the data point in this direction.
First of all, is the vivid and striking contrast betweenhospital statistics and those gathered from private practice. While many individuals of a fair wage-earner's income and good bodily vigor are treated in our hospitals, yet the vast majority of hospital patients are technically known as the "hospital classes," apt to be both underfed, overworked, and overcrowded. On the other hand, while a great many both of the very poor and even of the destitute are treated in private practice, yet the majority of such cases who feel "able to afford a doctor," as they say, are among the comparatively vigorous, well-fed, and well-housed section of the community. And the difference between the death-rate of the two classes in pneumonia is most significant. In private practice, while epidemics differ in virulence, the rate ranges all the way from five per cent to fifteen per cent, the average being not much in excess of ten per cent, occasionally falling as low as three per cent. In the hospital reports on the contrary the death-rate begins at twenty per cent and climbs to thirty, forty, and forty-five per cent. It is only fair to say, of course, that hospital statistics probably include a larger percentage of more serious cases, the milder ones being taken care of at home, or not presenting themselves for treatment at all. But even when this allowance has been made, the contrast is convincing.
A similar influence is exercised by age. Although pneumonia is common at all ages, its heaviest death-rate falls at the two extremes, under six years of age and over sixty, with a strong preponderance in the latter. Under five years of age, the mortality may reach twenty to thirty per cent; from five to twenty-five, notmore than four to five per cent; from twenty-five to thirty-five, from fifteen to twenty per cent; and so on, increasing gradually with every decade until by sixty years of age the mortality has reached fifty per cent, and from sixty to seventy-five may be expressed in terms of the age of the patient. One consoling feature, however, about it is that its mortality is lowest in the ages at which it is most frequent, namely, from ten to thirty-five years of age. And its frequency diminishes even more rapidly than its fatality increases in later years. So that while it is much more serious in a middle-aged man, he is less liable to develop it than a younger one. Where the mortality from pneumonia is highest, is in the most densely populated wards, especially among negroes and foreigners of the hospital class, in individuals who are victims of chronic alcoholism, and also among those who are for long periods insufficiently nourished. Lastly, it is only within comparatively recent years that we have come clearly to recognize the large rôle which pneumonia plays in giving the finishing stroke to chronic diseases and degenerative processes. It is, for instance, one of the commonest actual causes of death in Bright's disease, in diabetes, in lingering forms of tuberculosis, and in heart disease; and last of all, in that progressive process of normal degeneration and decay which we term "Old Age." It is one of the most frequent and fatal of what Flexner described a decade ago as "terminal infections." Very few human beings die by a gradual process of decay, still less go to pieces all at once, like the immortal "One-Hoss Shay." Just as soon as theprocess has progressed far enough to lower the resisting power below a certain level, some acute infection steps in and mercifully ends the scene. This is peculiarly true of pneumonia in old age.
To the medical profession to "die of old age" is practically equivalent to dying of pneumonia. The disease is so mild in its symptoms and so rapid in its course that it often utterly escapes recognition as such.
The old man complains of a little pain in his chest, a failure of appetite, a sense of weakness and dizziness. He takes to his bed, within forty-eight hours he becomes unconscious, and within twenty-four more he is peacefully breathing his last. After death, two-thirds of the lung will be found consolidated. So mild and rapid and painless is the process that one physician-philosopher actually described pneumonia as "the friend of old age."
When once the disease has obtained a foothold in the body its course, like one of Napoleon's campaigns, is short, sharp, and decisive. Beginning typically with a vigorous chill, sometimes so suddenly as to wake the patient out of a sound sleep, followed by a stabbing pain in the side, cough, high fever, rapid respiration, the sputum rusty or orange-colored from leakage of blood from the congested lung, within forty-eight hours the attacked area of the lung has become congested; in forty-eight more, almost solidified by the thick, sticky exudate poured out from the blood-vessels, which coagulates and clots in the air cells. So complete is this solidification that sections of the attacked lung, insteadof floating in water as normal lung-tissue will, sink promptly. The severe pain usually subsides soon, but the fever, rapid respiration, flushed face, with or without delirium, will continue for from three to seven or eight days. Then, as suddenly as the initial attack, comes a plunge down of the temperature to normal. Pain and restlessness disappear, the respiration drops from thirty-five or forty to fifteen or twenty per minute, and the disease has practically ended by "crisis." Naturally, after such a furious onslaught, the patient is apt to be greatly weakened. He may have lost twenty or thirty pounds in the week of the fever, and from one to three weeks more in bed may be necessary for him to regain his strength. But the chief risk and danger are usually over within a week or ten days at the outside.
Violent and serious as are the changes in the lung, it is very seldom that death comes by interference with the breathing space. In fact, while regarded as a lung disease, we are now coming to recognize that the actual cause of death in fatal cases is the overwhelming of the heart by the toxins or poisons poured into the circulation from the affected lung. The mode of treatment is, therefore, to support the strength of the patient in every way, and measures directed to the affected lung are assuming less and less importance in our arsenal of remedies. Our attitude is now very similar to that in typhoid, to support the strength of the patient by judicious and liberal feeding, to reduce the fever and tone up his blood-vessels by cool sponging, packing, and even bathing; to relieve his pain by the mildestpossible doses of sedatives, knowing that the disease is self-limited, and that in patients in comfortable surroundings and fair nutrition from eighty to ninety per cent will throw off the attack within a week. So completely have we abandoned all idea of medicating or protecting the lung as such, that in place of overheated rooms, loaded with vapor by means of a steam kettle, for its supposed soothing effect upon the inflamed lung, we now throw the windows wide open. And some of our more enthusiastic clinicians of wide experience are actually introducing the open-air cure, which has worked such wonders in tuberculosis, in the treatment of pneumonia. In more than one of our New York hospitals now, particularly those devoted to the care of children, following the brilliant example of Dr. William Northrup, wards are established for pneumonia cases out on the roof of the hospital, even when the snow is banked up on either side, and the covering is a canvas tent. Nurses, physicians, and ward attendants are clothed in fur coats and gloves, the patients are kept muffled up to the ears, with only the face exposed; but instead of perishing from exposure, little, gasping, struggling tots, whose cases were regarded as practically hopeless in the wards below, often fall into the sleep that is the turning point toward recovery within a few hours after being placed in this winter roof-garden.
In short, our motto may be said to be, "Take care of the patient, and the disease will take care of itself."
Though pneumonia is one of our most serious andmost fatal of diseases, yet it is one over whose cause, spread, and cure we are obtaining greater and greater control every day, and which certainly should, within the next decade, yield to our attack, as tuberculosis and typhoid are already beginning to do.
Why should not a disease have a natural history, as well as an individual? At first sight, this might appear like a reversion to the old, crude theory of disease as a demonic obsession, or invasion by an evil spirit, of which traces still remain in such expressions as, "She wasseizedwith a convulsion," "He was strong enough tothrow offthe illness," "He wasattackedby a fever," etc. But apart entirely from such conceptions, which were perfectly natural in the infancy of the race, while clearly recognizing that disease is simply a perverted state of nutrition or well-being in the body of the patient, a disturbance of balance, so to say, yet it is equally true that it has a birth, an ancestry, a life-course, and a natural termination, or death.
This recognition of the natural causation and development of disease has been one of the greatest triumphs, not merely of pathology, but of intelligence and rationalism. It has done more to diminish that dread of the unknown which hangs like a black pall of terror over the mind of the savage and the semi-civilized mind than any other one advance. It contributes enormously to our courage, our hopefulness, and our power of protection in more ways than one: first of all, by revealing to us the external cause of disease,usually some careless, dirty, or bad habit on the part of an individual or of the community, and thus enabling us to limit its spread and even exterminate it; secondly, by assuring us that nearly all diseases, excepting a few of the most obstinate and serious, have not only a definite beginning, but a definite end, are, in fact, if left to themselves, self-limited, either by the exhaustion and loss of virulence of their cause, or by the resisting power of the body.
All infectious diseases, and many others, tend to run a definite course of so many days, or so many weeks, within certain limits, and at least ninety per cent of them tend to terminate in recovery. It is a most serious and fatal disease which has a death-rate of more than twenty per cent. Typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria, and yellow fever all fall below this, smallpox barely reaches it, and only the bubonic plague, cholera, and lockjaw rise habitually above it. The recognition of this fact has enormously increased the efficiency of the medical profession in dealing with disease, by putting us on the track of imitating the methods which the body itself uses for destroying, or checking the spread of, invading germs and leading us to trust nature and try to work with her instead of against her. Our antitoxins and anti-serums, which are our brightest hope in therapeutics at present, are simply antidotes which are formed in the blood of some healthy, vigorous animal against the bacillus whose virulence we wish to neutralize, such as that of diphtheria or septicemia.
Diphtheria antitoxin, for instance, the first and best known triumph of the new medicine, is the antidotalsubstance formed in the blood of a horse in response to a succession of increasing doses of the bacilli of diphtheria. Similar antidotal substances are formed in the blood in all other non-fatal cases of infectious diseases, such as typhoid, pneumonia, blood-poisoning, etc.; and the point at which they have accumulated in sufficient amounts to neutralize the poison of the invading germs, forms the crisis, or "turn" of the disease. So that when we speak of a disease "running its course," we mean continuing for such length of time as the body needs to produce anti-bodies in sufficient amounts to check it.
The principal obstacle to the securing of antitoxins like that of diphtheria for all our infectious diseases is, that their germs form their poison so slowly that it is difficult to collect it in sufficient amounts to produce a strong concentrated antitoxin in the animal into which it is injected. But the overcoming of this difficulty is probably only a question of time.
Obviously, if infectious disease be, as we say, "self-limited," that is to say, if the body will defeat the invaders with its own weapons, on an average in nine cases out of ten, our wisest course, as physicians, is to back up the body in its fight. This we now do in every possible way, by careful feeding, by rest, by bathing, by an abundance of pure water and fresh air, with the gratifying result that we have already reduced the death-rate in most fevers, even such as we have no antitoxin against, or may not even have discovered the causal germ of, to one-half and even three-fourths of their former fatality. The recognition of the fact that disease has a natural history, a birth, a term ofnatural life and a death, has already turned a hopeless fight in the dark into a victorious campaign in broad daylight. Huxley's pessimistic saying that typhoid was like a fight in the dark between the disease and the patient, and the doctor like a man with a club striking into the mélée, sometimes hitting the disease and sometimes the patient, is no longer true since the birth of bacteriology.
Nowhere can the natural history of disease be more clearly seen or more advantageously studied than in the case of typhoid fever.
The cause of typhoid is simplicity itself, merely drinking the excreta of some one else, "eating dirt," in the popular phrase; simple, but of a deadly effectiveness, and disgracefully common. The demon may be exorcised by an incantation of one sentence:Keep human excreta out of the drinking water.This sounds simple, but it is n't. Eternal vigilance is the price of health as well as of liberty.
We can, however, make our pedigree of typhoid a little more precise. It is not merely dirt of human origin which is injurious, but dirt of a particular type, namely, discharges from a previous case of the disease. Just as in the fight against malaria we have not the enormous problem of the extermination of all varieties of mosquito, but only of one particular genus, and only the infected specimens of that, so in typhoid, the contamination of water or food which we have to guard against is that from previous cases. From one point of view, this leaves the problem as wide as ever, for, obviously, the only way to insure againstpoisoning of water by typhoid discharges is to shut out absolutely all sewage contamination. On the other hand, it is of immense advantage in this regard,—it enables us to fight the enemy at both ends of the line, to turn his flank as well as crush his centre.
While we are protecting our water-supplies against sewage, we can, in the meantime, render that sewage comparatively harmless by thoroughly disinfecting and sterilizing all discharges from every known case of the disease. A similar method is used in the fight against yellow fever and malaria. Not only are the breeding places of the two mosquito criminals broken up, but each known case of the disease is carefully screened,so as to prevent the insects from becoming infected, and thus able to transmit the disease to other human victims.
It cannot be too emphatically insisted upon that every case of typhoid, like every case of yellow fever and of malaria,comes from a previous case. It is neither healthy nor exhilarating to drink a clear solution of sewage, no matter how dilute; but, as a matter of fact, it is astonishing how long communities may drink sewage-laden water with comparative impunity, so long as the sewage contains no typhoid discharges. One case of typhoid fever imported into a watershed will set a city in a blaze.
The malevolentDeusin the sewagemachinais, of course, a germ—theBacillus typhosusof Eberth. The astonishing recentness of much of our most important knowledge is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of typhoid. Although there had been vague descriptions of a fatal fever, slow and lingering in itscharacter and accompanied by prolonged stupor and delirium, which was associated with camps and dirty cities and famines, from as far back as the age of Cæsar, the first description clear enough to be recognizable was that of Willis, of an epidemic during the English civil war in 1643, both Royalist and Roundhead armies being seriously crippled by it. Since that time a smouldering, slowly spreading fever has been pretty constantly associated with armies in camps, besieged cities, filthy jails, and famines, to which accordingly have been given the names, familiar in historical literature, of "famine fever," "jail fever," and "military fever."
So slowly, however, did accurate knowledge come, that it was actually not until 1837 that it was clearly and definitely recognized that this famine fever was, like Mrs. Malaprop's Cerberus, "two gentlemen at once," one form of it being typhus or "spotted fever," which has now become almost extinct in civilized communities; the other, the milder, but more persistent form, which, like the poor, we have always with us, called, from its resemblance to the former, "typhoid" (typhus-like).
Typhus was a far more virulent, rapid, and fatal fever than its twin survivor, though as to the relations between the two diseases, if any, we are quite in the dark, as the former practically disappeared before the days of bacteriology. The fact of its disappearance is both significant and interesting, in that it was unquestionably due to the ranker and viler forms of both municipal and individual filthiness and unsanitariness, which even our moderate progress in civilization has nowabolished. There can be no question that, with a step higher in the scale of cleanliness, and further quickening of the biologic conscience, typhoid will also disappear.
Typhus, the bubonic plague, the sweating sickness, were alike plagues and products of times when table-scraps were thrown on the dining-room floor and covered daily with fresh rushes for a week at a stretch, and fertilizer accumulated in a living-room as now in a modern stable. Clothing was put on for the season, shirts were unknown, and strong perfumes took the place of a bath. Michelet's famous characterization of the Middle Ages in one phrase asUn mille ans sans bain(a thousand years without a bath) was painfully accurate.
Doubtless certain habits of our own to-day will be regarded with equal disgust by our descendants. Typhus, by the way, may possibly be remembered by the dramatic "Black Assize" of Oxford, in 1577, in which not merely the wretched prisoners in the jail, but the jurors, the lawyers, the judges, and every official of the court were attacked, and many of them died.
It was only in 1856 that the method of transmission of the disease was clearly recognized, and in 1880 that the bacillus was discovered and identified by the bacteriologist Eberth, whose name it bears, so that it is only within the last thirty years that real weapons have been put into our hands with which to begin a fight of extermination against the disease.
What is the habitat of our organism, and is it increasing its spread? Its habitat is the entire civilizedworld, and it goes wherever civilization goes. In this sense its spread is increasing, but, in every other, we have good ground for believing that it is on the wane. Positive assurance, either one way or the other, is, of course, impossible, simply for the reason that the disease was not recognized until such a short time ago that no statistics of any real value for comparison are available; and, secondly, because even to-day, on account of its insidious character and the astonishing variety of its forms, and degrees of mildness and virulence, a considerable percentage of cases are yet unrecognized and unreported.
It might be mentioned in passing that this statement applies to the alleged increase of nearly all diseases which are popularly believed to be modern inventions, like appendicitis, insanity, and cancer. We have no statistics more than thirty years old which are of real value for purposes of comparison.
However, when it comes to the number of deaths from the disease, there is a striking and gratifying diminution for twenty years past, which is increasing in ratio instead of diminishing. That we are really getting control of typhoid is shown by the, at first sight, singular and decidedly unexpected fact that it is no longer a disease of cities, but of the country. The death-rate per thousand living in the cities of the United States is lower than in the rural districts. For instance, the mortality in the State of Maryland, outside of Baltimore, is two and one-half times as great as that in the city itself. Our period of greatest outbreak in the large cities is now the month of September, when city dwellers have just returned from their vacations in the pure and healthful country, bringing the bacilli in their systems.
The moral is obvious. Great cities are developing some sort of a sanitary conscience. Farmers and country districts have as yet little or none. Bad as our city water often is, and defective as our systems of sewage, they cannot for a moment compare in deadliness with that most unheavenly pair of twins, the shallow well and the vault privy. A more ingenious combination for the dissemination of typhoid than this precious couple could hardly have been devised. The innocent householder sallies forth, and at an appropriate distance from his cot he digs two holes, one about thirty feet deep, the other about four. Into the shallower one he throws his excreta, while upon the surface of the ground he flings abroad his household waste from the back stoop. The gentle rain from heaven washes these various products down into the soil and percolates gradually into the deeper hole. When the interesting solution has accumulated to a sufficient depth, it is drawn up by the old oaken bucket or modern pump, and drunk. Is it any wonder that in this progressive and highly civilized country three hundred and fifty thousand cases of typhoid occur every year, with a death penalty of ten per cent? Counting half of these as workers, and the period of illness as two months, which would be very moderate estimates, gives a loss of productive working time equivalent to thirty thousand years. Talk of "cheap as dirt"! It is the most expensive thing there is.
Typhoid still abundantly earns its old name of "military fever," and its sinister victories in war are even more renowned than its daily triumphs in peace. Strange as it may seem, the deadliest enemies of the soldier are not bullets but bacilli, and sewage is mightier than the sword. For instance, in the Franco-Prussian War, typhoid alone caused sixty per cent of all the deaths. In the Boer War it caused nearly six thousand deaths as compared with seven thousand five hundred from wounds in battle, while other diseases caused five thousand more. In the majority of modern campaigns, from two-thirds to five-sixths of all deaths are due to disease and not to battle. It may be that we sanitarians will achieve the ends of the peace congresses by an unexpected route, and make war a healthful and comparatively harmless form of national gymnastics. Its battle-mortality rate, for the number engaged, is not so very far above football now!
Given the bacillus, how does it get into the human system? Here the evidence is so abundant and overwhelming that we may content ourselves with bald statements of fact. The three great routes of this pestilence are water, milk, and flies. Of the three, the first is far the most common and important. While only a rough statement is possible, probably eighty-five per cent of all cases from water, five per cent from milk, five per cent through flies, and five per cent through other channels, would fairly represent the percentage.
That it is conveyed through water is as certain as that the sun rises and sets. The only embarrassment in proving it lies in selecting from the swarm of instances. There is the classic case of the Swiss villages on opposite sides of the same mountain chain, the second of which drew its water-supply from a spring that came through the mountain from a brooklet running by the first village. Typhoid fever broke out in the first village, and twenty days later it appeared in the second village, twenty miles away on the other side of the mountain. Colored particles thrown into the brook on one side promptly appeared in the spring upon the other. Then there was the gruesome modern instance of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, in 1885. A single case of imported typhoid occurring on the watershed of a reservoir was followed, thirty days later, by an epidemic of eleven hundred cases in a population of eight thousand.
An equally vivid instance came under my own observation. A school and a penitentiary drew their water-supply from the same power-flume, carrying a superb volume of purest water from a mountain stream. Early in the autumn a single case of typhoid appeared in a small town near the head of the flume. The discharges were thrown into the swiftly running water. Two weeks later an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the school, and three weeks later in the penitentiary. An unexpected freak, however, was the appearance of fifteen or twenty cases in another state institution farther down on the same stream, which did not draw its water-supply from the flume, but from deep wells of tested purity. This was a puzzle, until it was found that, owing to a fall in the wells, the water from the flume had been used for sprinkling and washing purposes in the institution, being allowed to run through the water-pipes only at night, while the well-water was used in the daytime. This was enough to contaminate the pipes, and a small epidemic began, which promptly stopped as soon as the cause was suspected and the flume-water no longer used.
This last instance is peculiarly interesting, as illustrating how typhoid infection gets into milk, the second—though at a long interval—most frequent means of its spread. It does not come from the cow, for, fortunately, none of the domestic animals, with the possible exception of the cat, is subject to typhoid. Nor is it possible that cattle, drinking foul and even infected water, can transmit the bacillus in their milk. That superstition was exploded long ago. Every epidemic of typhoid spread by milk—and there are scores of them now on record—can be traced to the handling of the milk by persons suffering from mild forms of typhoid, or engaged in waiting upon members of the family who are ill of the disease, or the dilution of milk with infected water, or even, almost incredible as it may seem, to such slight contamination as washing the cans with infected water.
Health officers now watch like hawks for the appearance of any case of typhoid among or in the families of dairymen. The New York City Board of Health, for instance, requires the weekly filing of a certificate from the family physician of all dairymen that no such cases exist. And the more intelligent dairymen keep a vigilant eye upon any appearance of illness accompanied by fever among their employees, some that I haveknown even keeping a fever thermometer in the barn for the purpose of testing every suspicious case. How effective such precautions can be made may be illustrated by the fact that, in the past five years, there has not been a single epidemic of typhoid traceable to milk in Greater New York, even with its inadequate corps of ten inspectors, and the six states they have to cover. The moment a single case of typhoid appears, the dairy or milkman supplying that customer is given a most rigid special inspection, and, if any source of infection can be discovered, the milk is shut out of New York City until the department is satisfied that all danger has been removed. One or two lessons of this sort are enough for a whole county of dairymen. The danger of transmission of typhoid through milk has been enormously exaggerated, and, as in the case of all other milk-borne diseases, is entirely due to filthy handling, and may be prevented by intelligent sanitary policing. Even with our present exceedingly imperfect systems, probably not more than between five and ten per cent of typhoid is transmitted in this way; and, if the water-supply were kept clean, this would practically disappear.
Typhoid may not only be transmitted from the earth beneath and the water under the earth, but also from the heavens above, through the medium of flies and dust. The first method is bulking larger every day, especially in country districts and in camps. Themodus operandiis simplicity itself. The fly lives and moves and has its being in dirt. It breeds in dirt and it feeds on food, and, as it never wipes its feet, the interesting results can be imagined. Just to dispel any possible doubt, plates of gelatine have been exposed where flies could walk on them, then placed in an incubator, and within forty-eight hours there was a clearly recorded track of the footprints of the flies written in clumps of bacilli sown by their filthy feet. More definitely, flies have been caught in the houses of typhoid patients, put under the microscope, and their feet, stomachs, and specks found swarming with typhoid bacilli. A single flyspeck may contain three thousand.
Fortunately, we have a simple and effective remedy. We cannot disinfect the fly nor make him wipe his feet, but wecanexterminate him utterly! This sounds difficult, but it isn't. Like the mosquito, the fly can only breed in one particular kind of place, and that place is a heap of dirt, preferably horse manure, but, at a pinch, dust-bins, garbage-cans, sweepings under porches or behind furniture, vaults,—anywhere that dirt is allowed to remain undisturbed for more than a week at a stretch. Abolish, screen, or poison these dirt accumulations, and flies will disappear, and with them not merely risks from typhoid, but half a dozen other diseases, as well as all sorts of filth and much discomfort and inconvenience. It was largely through flies that the disgraceful epidemic of typhoid, which ravaged our camps on our own soil during the Spanish-American War and killed many times more than fell by Spanish bullets, was spread.
It is also believed that typhoid bacilli may be carried in the infected dust of streets and camps. Here again we are dealing with a dangerous public enemy to bothhealth and comfort, which can and ought to be abated by cleanliness, oilings, and sprinklings. Typhoid bacilli are also occasionally carried by shellfish, especially oysters, on account of the interesting modern custom of planting them in bays and harbors near the mouths of sewers to fatten them. The cheerful motto of the oysterman is, "The muddier the water the fatter the oyster." And nowhere do the bivalves plump up more quickly than near the mouth of a sewer.
The last method of transmission is by direct contact with the sick. This is a relatively rare means of spread, so much so that it is generally stated that typhoid is not contagious; but it is a real source of danger and one against which precautions should by all means be taken. The only method is, of course, by the soiling of the hands of the nurse or other attendant, and then eating or touching food, or putting the fingers into the mouth before thoroughly cleansing. If the hands be washed with a strong antiseptic solution after waiting upon the patient, and the cheerful habit sometimes indulged in of putting fruit or other delicacies into the sick-room for a day or so, in the hope that they may tempt the appetite of the patient, and then taking them out and letting the children eat them as a treat, be abolished, and the nurse be not allowed to officiate in the kitchen, risk from this source will be done away with.
When the bacillus has been introduced into the stomach through food or drink, it rapidly proceeds to diffuse itself throughout the tissues of the body. Because the most striking symptoms of the disease are diarrhœa, abdominal distention, and pain, and the most strikinglesions after death ulcers in the small intestine, it was supposed that the process was confined to the abdominal organs. This is now known to be an error, as cultures and examinations made from the blood and various parts of the body have shown the presence of the typhoid bacillus in almost every organ and tissue. This process of scattering, or invasion of the body, takes from three to ten days to accomplish; and the first sign of trouble is usually a feeling of depression, with headache, and perhaps slight nausea, before any characteristic bowel symptoms begin to show themselves.
The general invasion of the system throws an interesting sidelight upon the subject of premonitions. There are several well authenticated cases on record where individuals just before coming down with typhoid have been strangely impressed with a sense of impending death, and have even gone so far as to make their wills and set their affairs in order. Because these strong impressions appeared before any clearly marked intestinal symptoms of the disease, they have been put down in popular literature as instances of the "second sight," or "sixth sense," which popular superstition believes many of us to possess under certain circumstances. Now, however, we know that the tissues of that individual were already swarming with bacilli, and his fear of impending death was simply the effect of his toxin-laden blood upon his brain centres. In other words, it was prophecy after the fact, like nearly all prophecies that happen to come true; and the "premonition" was an early symptom of the disease itself.
As it is, of course, difficult to fix the precise drink of water or mouthful of food in which the infection was conveyed, we were for a long time in doubt as to the length of time which it took to spread through the system,—the "period of incubation," as it is termed,—although we knew in a general way that it averaged somewhere about ten days. But, about a year ago, fortune was kind to us. A nurse in one of the Parisian hospitals, in a fit of despondency, decided to commit suicide. Like a true Parisienne, she would be nothing if not up to date, and chose, as the mostrecherchéand original method of departing this life, to swallow a pure culture of typhoid germs, which she abstracted from the laboratory. Three days later she began to complain of headache, and within a week had developed a beautiful crop of symptoms, and a typical case of typhoid, from which, under modern treatment, she promptly recovered,—a wiser and, we trust, a happier woman.
By just what avenue the infecting bacilli go from the stomach into the general system we do not know. Metschnikoff suggests that they can only penetrate the intestinal wall through wounds or abrasions of the mucous membrane, made by intestinal worms or other parasites. Certain it is that the average stomach has a considerable degree of resisting power against them, for in no known civil epidemic has the number of those who caught the disease exceeded ten per cent of the total number drinking the infected water or milk. In one or two camps in time of war the percentage has risen as high as eighteen or twenty per cent of those exposed, but this is exceptional. However, nowthat we know that intestinal symptoms do not constitute the entire disease, and may even be entirely absent, we strongly suspect that many cases of slight depression, with feverishness, loss of appetite, and disturbances of the digestion, which occur during an epidemic, may really have been very mild cases of the disease.
One of the singular features of the disease is that, unlike many other infections, we are entirely unable to say what conditions or influences seem either to protect against it or to predispose toward it. In the days when we believed it to be an exclusively intestinal disease it was naturally supposed that chronic digestive disturbances, and especially acute attacks of bowel trouble or dysentery, would predispose to it, but this has been entirely disproved. Soldiers in barracks with chronic digestive disturbances, and even with dysentery, have shown no higher percentage of typhoid during an epidemic than others. Nor does it seem much more likely to occur in those who are constitutionally weak, or run down, or overworked, as some of the most violent and unmanageable cases occur in vigorous men and women, who were previously in perfect health. So that, although we have unquestionably a high degree of resistance against it, since not more than one in ten exposed contracts it, and only one in ten of those who contract it dies, we have not the least idea in what direction, so to speak, to build up our resisting powers in order to increase them.
The best remedy is to destroy the disease altogether, and this could be done in five years by intelligent concerted effort. It was at one time supposed that typhoid fever was a disease exclusively confined to adult life; but it is now known to occur frequently in children, though often in such a mild and irregular form as to escape recognition. Something like seventy per cent of all cases occur between the fifteenth and the fortieth year, and it is, for some reason, though rarer, peculiarly serious and more often fatal after the fiftieth year.
When once the outer wall has been pierced, the sack of the city rapidly proceeds. The bacilli multiply everywhere, but seem for some reason to focalize chiefly in the alimentary canal, and especially the middle part of it, the small intestines. After headache, backache, and loss of appetite comes usually a mild diarrhœa. This diarrhœa is due to an attack of the bacillus or its toxins upon certain clumps of lymphoid tissue in the wall of the small intestine, known as the "patches of Peyer." This produces inflammation, followed by ulceration, which in severe cases may eat through the wall of a blood-vessel, causing profuse hemorrhages, or even perforate the bowel wall and set up a fatal peritonitis. The temperature begins to swing from two to five degrees above the normal level, following the usual daily vibration, and ranging from 100 degrees to 101 degrees in the morning up to 102 degrees to 105 degrees in the afternoon. The face becomes flushed.
There is usually comparatively little pain, and the patient lies in a sort of mild stupor, paying little attention to his surroundings. He is much enfeebled and seldom cares to lift his head from the pillow. A slight rash appears upon the surface of the body, but thisis so faint that it would escape attention unless carefully looked for. Little groups of vesicles, containing clear fluid, appear upon the chest and abdomen. If one of these faint rose-colored spots be pricked with a needle and a drop of blood be drawn, typhoid bacilli will often be found in it, and they will also be present in the clear fluid of the tiny sweat blisters.
This condition will last for from ten days to four weeks, the patient gradually becoming weaker and more apathetic, and the temperature maintaining an afternoon level of 102 to 104 degrees. Then, in the vast majority of cases, a little decline of the temperature will be noticed. The patient begins to take a slight interest in his surroundings. He will perhaps ask for something to drink, or something to eat, instead of apathetically swallowing what is offered to him. Next day the temperature is a little lower still, and within a week, perhaps, will have returned to the normal level. The patient has lost from twenty to forty pounds, is weak as a kitten, and it may be ten days after the fever has disappeared before he asks to sit up in bed.
Then follows the period of return to health. The patient becomes a walking appetite, and, after weeks of liquid diet, will beg like a spoiled child for cookies or hard apples or pie, or something that he can set his teeth into. But his tissues are still swarming with the bacilli, and any indiscretion, either of diet, exposure, or exertion, at this time, may result in forming a secondary colony, or abscess, somewhere in the lungs, the liver, or the muscles. He must be kept quiet and warm, and abundantly, but judiciously, fed, for at least threeweeks after the disappearance of the fever, if he wishes to avoid the thousand and one ambuscades set by the retreating enemy.
Now, what has happened when recovery begins? One would suppose that either the bacilli had poisoned themselves, exhausted the supplies of nourishment in the body of the patient, so that the fever had "burnt itself out," as we used to say, or that the tissues had rallied from the attack and destroyed or thrown out the invaders. But, on the contrary, we find that our convalescent patient, even after he is up and walking about, is still full of the bacilli.
To put it very crudely, what has really happened is that the body has succeeded in forming such antidotes against the poison of the bacilli that, although they may be present in enormous numbers, they can no longer produce any injurious effect. In other words, it has acquired immunity against this particular germ and its toxin. In fact, one of our newest and most reliable tests for the disease consists in a curious "clumping" or paralyzing power over cultures of theBacillus typhosus, shown by a drop of the patient's blood, even as early as the seventh or eighth day of the illness. And, while it is an immensely difficult and complicated subject, we are justified in saying that this immunity is not merely a substance formed in the body, the stock of which will shortly become exhausted, but a faculty acquired by the body-cells, which they will retain, like other results of education, for years, and even for life. When once the body has learned the wrestling trick of throwing and vanquishing a particular germ or bacillus, it no longer has much to dread from that germ. This is why the same individual is seldom attacked the second time by scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, and smallpox.
While, however, the individual may be entirely immune to the germs of a given disease, he may carry them in his body in enormous numbers, and infect others while escaping himself.
This is peculiarly true of typhoid, and we are beginning to extend our sanitary care over recovered patients, not merely to the end of acute illness, but for the period of at least a month after they have apparently recovered. Several most disquieting cases are on record of so-called "typhoid carriers," or individuals who, having recovered from the disease itself, carried and spread the infection wherever they went for months and even years afterward. This, however, is probably a rare state of affairs, though a recent German health bulletin reports the discovery of some twenty cases during the past year. The lair of the bacilli is believed to be the gall-bladder.
As to treatment, it may be broadly stated that all authorities and schools are for once practically agreed:—
First, that we have no known specific drug for the cure of the disease.
Second, that we are content to take a leaf out of nature's book, and follow—so to speak—her instinctive methods: first of all, by putting the patient to bed the moment that a reasonable suspicion of the disease is formed; this conserves his strength, and greatly diminishes the danger of serious complications; cases of "walking typhoid" have among the highest death-rates; second, by meeting the great instinctive symptom of fever patients since the world began, thirst, encouraging the patient to drink large quantities of water, taking care, of course, that the water is pure and sterile. The days when we kept fever patients wrapped up to their necks in woolen blankets in hot, stuffy rooms, and rigorously limited the amount of water that they drank—in other words, fought against nature in the treatment of disease—have passed. A typhoid-fever patient now is not only given all he wants to drink, but encouraged to take more, and some authorities recommend an intake of at least three or four quarts, and, better, six and eight quarts a day. This internal bath helps not only to allay the temperature, but to make good the enormous loss by perspiration from the fevered skin, and to flush the toxins out of the body.