The sanitary protection of New Orleans, municipal and maritime / by Joseph Holt.

  • Holt, Joseph, 1839-1922.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The sanitary protection of New Orleans, municipal and maritime / by Joseph Holt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    9/22 (page 7)
    The sanitary redemption of New Orleans frpm being a dream of the future would soon become an assured fact. An era of prosperity would open upon Louisiana with such a golden radiance as would send a thrill of unfeigned joy into the heart of every American, whose national pride and patriotic love of this glorious unity is generous, and as broad as the scope of this broad land, which is his heritage. THE SANITARY PROTECTION OF NEW ORLEANS—MARITIME. ]\Iaritiiiie sanitation has taken the place of quarantine on the- sca-board approaches to New Orleans. The term is in itself a complete acknowledgment and a declaration of allegiance to the germ theory of the great pesti- lential infections, just as the word quarantine carries within, itself the essential idea of prolonged detention ; a virtual ac- knowledgment of utter ignorance of all the conclusions estab- lished by modern observation of the phenomena of these dis- eases, confirmed by microscopic research and experimental tests in the announcements of Pasteur, Koch, Klien, in the voices from the far regions of the tropics, Carmona, Freire,, and their able coadjutors, and last, but of the first magnitude in this blazing galaxy of lights, Sternberg ! The inevitable conclusions deduced from the observed con- duct of these diseases have compelled the germ theory of their nature. It is no ingenious figure of the imagination, but a doctrine hammered into shape by sheer force of logic. Every phe- nomenon of measles, scarlatina, diphtheria, small-pox, cholera, and yellow-fever gives a sledge-hammer blow, driving into us the idea of a living organism, a definite entity, as the essential cause of each, differing in kind according to the disease. Laying aside certain hypercritical sophistries and the off- hand denunciations of constitutional objectors, even against Jenner himself, we may now declare that the germ nature of these diseases has passed from the form of a diluted theory into that of a crystallized fact, so that, in contending against the introduction of pestilence along the highways of com.- merce, we now no longer oppose mysterious phantoms with, the suggestions of superstition, but fight a real and defined-