Tuberculosis of the lungs is spread especially through sputum. In the room occupied by the patient, the clothes, furniture, walls, doors, and floor are infected by the bacilli coughed out, even when the consumptive is careful to disinfect the sputum, and, by the way, he rarely is careful. When the priest visits a consumptive's room he should disinfect his hands with bichloride.
Leprosy is caused by the lepra bacillus, discovered by Hansen in 1871. It is present in many parts of the body, especially in the glands and nervous tissues, and it is found in the mucosa of the mouth and in the nasal secretions. It is very profusely distributed in the corium of the skin. The name comes from
, scaly.
Leprosy is present here and there along the Mississippi valley from Minnesota and Wisconsin to Louisiana. It is found also in California, Florida, and the Dakotas, in the Philippines, the West Indies, and the worst infected part of the world is the Hawaiian Islands.
The bacillus has not been found in rooms used by lepers, nor in the soil of their graves. Inoculation by leprous [{183}] material has failed so far undoubtedly to cause leprosy. There is much dispute concerning the contagiousness of this disease. The Dominican Sisters nursing in the Trinidad asylum have been in constant contact with the lepers for about thirty years but none of them has yet contracted the disease. Zambaco Pasha tells of a family which has lived in the leper asylum at Constantinople for three generations and no one in the family has been infected. Father Damien, however, in Molokai, and Father Boglioli, in New Orleans, did contract the disease. There have been cases of infection from man to man, but ordinarily it seems that some unknown factor must be present to insure infection.
A priest need have no more fear in visiting a case of leprosy than he should have in visiting a case of tuberculosis—not so much. He may wash his hands in bichloride solution after anointing a leper, but it is scarcely necessary to do even that.
Actinomycosis (
, ray-fungus) is a disease caused by actinomyces, a micro-organism that partly resembles a bacterium and partly a fungus. The disease can be fatal. It is very improbable that it ever passes from man to man, but as a matter of prudence the priest should wash his hands in bichloride after anointing such a patient.