Two or three days after, the little pet began to complain of a sore throat too. The symptoms grew rapidly alarming; and when the doctor came, the single word diphtheria sufficed to explain them all. To-day a little mound in Greenwood is the sole memento of your visit.
Of course the mother does not suspect, and would not dare to suspect, you of any Instrumentality in her bereavement. She charges it to a mysterious Providence. The doctor says nothing to disturb the delusion; that would be impolitic, if not cruel: but to an outsider he is free to say that the child’s death was due directly to your infernal stupidity. Those are precisely the words: more forcible than elegant, it is true; but who shall say, under the circumstances, that they are not justifiable? Remember,
“Evil is wrought by want of thought
As well as by want of heart.”
It would be hard to tell how much of the prevalent sickness and mortality from diphtheria is due to such want of thought. As a rule, adults have the disease in so mild a form that they mistake it for a simple cold; and, as a cold is not contagious, they think nothing of exposing others to their breath or to the greater danger of labial contact. Taking into consideration the well-established fact that diphtheria is usually if not always communicated by the direct transplanting of the malignant vegetation which causes the disease, the fact that there can be no more certain means of bringing the contagion to its favorite soil than the act of kissing, and the further fact that the custom of kissing children on all occasions is all but universal, it is not surprising that, when the disease is once imported into a community, it is very likely to become epidemic.
It would be absurd to charge the spread of diphtheria entirely to the practice of child-kissing. There are other modes of propagation: though it is hard to conceive of any more directly suited to the spread of the infection or more general in its operation. It stands to diphtheria in about the same relation that promiscuous hand-shaking formerly did to the itch.
It were better to avoid the practice. The children will not suffer if they go unkissed; and their friends ought for their sake to forego the luxury for a season. A single kiss has been known to infect a family; and the most careful may be in condition to communicate the disease without knowing it. Beware, then, of playing Judas, and let the babies alone.
