1772. Disinfecting Fumigation
Common salt, three ounces; black manganese, oil of vitriol, of each one ounce; water two ounces; carried in a cup through the apartments of the sick; or the apartments intended to be fumigated, where sickness has been, may be shut up for an hour or two, and then opened.
1773. Coffee a Disinfectant
Numerous experiments with roasted coffee prove that it is the most powerful means, not only of rendering animal and vegetable effluvia innocuous, but of actually destroying them. A room in which meat in an advanced degree of decomposition had been kept for some time, was instantly deprived of all smell on an open coffee-roaster being carried through it, containing a pound of coffee newly roasted. In another room, exposed to the effluvium occasioned by the clearing out of the dung-pit, so that sulphuretted hydrogen and ammonia in great quantities could be chemically detected, the stench was completely removed in half a minute, on the employment of three ounces of fresh-roasted coffee, whilst the other parts of the house were permanently cleared of the same smell by being simply traversed with the coffee-roaster, although the cleansing of the dung-pit continued for several hours after.
The best mode of using the coffee as a disinfectant is to dry the raw bean, pound it in a mortar, and then roast the powder on a moderately heated iron plate, until it assumes a dark brown tint, when it is fit for use. Then sprinkle it in sinks or cess-pools, or lay it on a plate in the room which you wish to have purified. Coffee acid or coffee oil acts more readily in minute quantities.
1774. Charcoal as a Disinfectant
The great efficacy of wood and animal charcoal in absorbing effluvia, and the greater number of gases and vapours, has long been known. Charcoal powder has also, during many centuries, been advantageously employed as a filter for putrid water, the object in view being to deprive the water of numerous organic impurities diffused through it, which exert injurious effects on the animal economy. Charcoal not only absorbs effluvia and gaseous bodies, but especially, when in contact with atmospheric air, oxidize, and destroys many of the easily alterable ones, by resolving them into the simplest combinations they are capable of forming, which are chiefly water and carbonic acid. It is on this oxidizing property of charcoal, as well as on its absorbent power, that its efficacy as a deodorizing and disinfecting agent chiefly depends.