Septicaemia, or blood-poisoning, can be brought about by different pyogenetic bacteria,—the varieties of the staphylococci (irregularly grouped cocci), streptococci (chain-cocci), pneumococci, and others. The danger of infection is so slight that it may be neglected.
Erysipelas can be fatal, especially in alcoholics, the aged, and in chronic diseases. Erysipelas is contagious, especially if the bacteria get into an abrasion in the skin. Patients having this disease sometimes grow delirious and violent, and the priest should be careful how he handles them. Disinfect the hands after anointing such a patient.
Tetanus, or lockjaw, is not communicable except by inoculation. The bacillus, which was isolated by Kitasato, the Japanese bacteriologist, in 1889, is found everywhere in soil, hay dust, floors, on old nails, especially on the floors of old wooden slaughter-houses. It grows best in deep wounds [{184}] where it is shut off from the oxygen of the air. Hence the danger of treading upon a nail that has been lying near the ground.
Beriberi, a disease observed especially among seamen, appears at times in our coast towns. It is always a very serious malady and sometimes it is rapidly fatal. The infective agent, which is not known, is not undoubtedly communicable from man to man, but it is carried from place to place, and it clings to ships and buildings; it thrives in hot, moist, crowded places. The priest should disinfect his hands after visiting a case.
Anthrax, called also wool-sorter's disease and splenic fever, is a very fatal disease, and the bacillus is communicable to any one through an abrasion of the skin, through the intestines by swallowing it, or through the lungs by breathing it in in dust. Disinfect the hands and the shoes after visiting a patient. Be careful not to touch anything in his room.
The bacteria that cause typhoid fever, Asiatic cholera (which has been epidemic in America) and epidemic dysentery must get on the hands, or on food, or in water, and thus reach the mouth and be swallowed before they produce these diseases. Act in cholera as in anthrax, and disinfect the hands after visiting a case of typhoid.
The bubonic plague, the most fatal of all epidemic diseases, has already appeared in California and Mexico. It is caused by a specific bacillus isolated by Kitasato and Yersin in 1894. The disease is communicated by contact and it is seemingly also miasmatic.
The terrible plague of the Black Death that swept over Europe from 1347 to 1350 was a malignant form of the bubonic plague. Over 1,200,000 people died in Germany, and Italy suffered much more. In Vienna for some time about 1000 people a day died and were buried in great trenches. Venice lost 100,000 inhabitants, and London lost more than that. In both Padua and Florence only one-third of the inhabitants were left alive; at Avignon the Rhone was consecrated so that bodies might be thrown into it for burial; and ships drifted about the coasts of Europe [{185}] with dead crews. Hecker, in his study of this plague, says that nearly one-fourth of the population of Europe died in that visitation. Civilisation was wellnigh overthrown in the panic. In Germany, Italy, and France the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells and thus causing the plague, and they were slaughtered by thousands. At Strasburg 2000 Jews were burned to death in one holocaust; at other places, as at Eslingen, in despair the Jews set fire to their synagogues and destroyed themselves. The Great Plague of London in 1665, in which 70,000 persons died, was also the bubonic plague.
The mortality is about 90 per centum in some epidemics. The bacillus leaves the body in the faeces, flies carry it to food, it thus gets to rats and mice, and it is carried from place to place. Rats, however, are commonly infected as if by a miasm before the disease appears in man. There is dispute as to the communicability of the plague from man to man by contact with fomites, but it is practically certain the disease can be thus transmitted. Kitasato once succeeded in producing the disease in animals by inoculation with dust taken in an infected house. Merely touching a patient does not apparently convey infection, yet some authorities hold that in time of epidemic the contagion is transmitted even through the air, especially on the ground floor of houses. Perhaps mosquitoes are the medium of infection, as they are inclined to fly low.
In visiting a case of bubonic plague the priest should be as cautious as if he were attending a smallpox patient. After death by smallpox, plague, typhus, cholera, scarlatina, diphtheria, and measles the funerals should be private and the bodies should not be taken to the church.