Sanitation of the body as well as of the dust heap now became the paramount question and especially did this apply to the practice of surgery.
How infection affects the body was the supreme mystery that the scientists of the past strove in vain to penetrate. By no devices of their laboratories could they detect the agents that caused the epidemic. There was only one satisfactory explanation The Mystery
of Infection of the origin and spread of the devastating plagues, which seemed to fall from the heavens on the people, and that was that epidemics were “a visitation of God” on account of the sins of the people. Of course, the only preventive and curative measure available and effectual was “repentance, prayer, and humiliation.”
It is a cause of devout thankfulness that while these things were hidden from the “wise and prudent” of former times, they have in these latter days been revealed unto “babes.” No event in human history would have more greatly taxed the credulity of the most learned and experienced physician of half a century ago than the prophecy that in the early years of the twentieth century school children would be taught by simple and easily understood object lessons how to prevent and how to cure consumption, the Asiatic cholera, yellow fever, and other epidemics that have devastated cities, destroyed armies, and swept from the earth whole tribes of primitive people.
But that prophecy has been literally fulfilled. During the last summer there has been a traveling object lesson that visited the different sections of the State of New York and taught the people, especially the children, all the essential facts as to the nature of the infection of tuberculosis, its effects on the body, and the methods of prevention and cure.
As infective diseases cause the vast majority of cases of severe and crippling affections and of deaths in every community, the value of a knowledge of the nature of infection and how it affects the body, by the people of all How Infection
Works ranks, ages, and conditions, cannot be estimated in its influence on the future of the human race. Already we learn that within the period referred to the sickness and death-rates of communities where the people have been most thoroughly instructed as to the nature of infective diseases, and how they affect the body, have greatly diminished, and the average human life has been markedly lengthened. Indeed, it now seems possible to restore the patriarchal age when a man may live to be “an hundred and twenty years old ... his eye ... not dim, nor his natural force abated.”
To understand how infection affects the body involves an inquiry as to the nature of infection, its mode of entrance into the body, and its operation on its organs and tissues. The terms “infection” and “contagion” are often used as synonymous; but a strict definition according to the medical significance of each limits the former to “the transmission of disease by actual contact of the diseased part with a healthy absorbent or abraded surface,” and the latter to “transmission through the atmosphere by floating germs.” But in the final analysis the cause of disease in both infection and contagion is so similar in its action that the medical profession has adopted the term “communicable disease” in all cases where the disease is communicated from one person to another by means of a germ, whatever may be its method of attack on the body. The common characteristic of “communicable diseases” is their germ origin.
What is this communicable germ or agent? A bacterium—a little stick, staff—so called from the rodlike shape it assumes in the process of growth. The individual bacterium (plural, bacteria) is an organism representing a low form of vegetable What the
Germ Is life; resembles mold; in size the smallest living thing that can be seen with the microscope; in masses forming the films floating on foul fluids or covering decomposing animal or vegetable matter. It consists of a single cell, and its mode of increase when placed under proper conditions of growth is by division of the cell body; the two cells formed out of the first being divided into four before complete separation has taken place; the four dividing into eight, the eight into sixteen, the sixteen into thirty-two, and so on indefinitely.
Now, as it requires only thirty minutes for one cell to divide, it has been estimated that a single bacterium will in twenty-four hours increase to the number of over sixteen million five hundred thousand, and in forty-eight hours to two hundred and eighty-one million five hundred thousand. At this rate of increase, in three days there would be a mass of bacteria weighing about sixteen million pounds. As the multiplication of bacteria depends upon conditions that soon interfere with or interrupt their growth, as the want of food, their own secretions, and certain natural forces operating against them, these stupendous figures are useful only as an illustration of the enormous fertility of these organisms, and their destructive energy when they attack a susceptible living body.
What is the function of bacteria in the economy of nature? It would be surprising if such a menace to human life as some species of bacteria have proved themselves to be had no other place among the forces of nature than to prevent the The Function of
Bacteria too rapid increase of the human race on this earth, as our forefathers believed. It is gratifying, and quite satisfying to a revengeful spirit, to learn from the modern laboratory that the special and only function of the bacterium is to perform the duties of a universal scavenger. It is always seeking to decompose animal and vegetable matter. It lives on filth, riots in it, and dies when deprived of it. It enters the human body only in search of filth, and if it finds none it does the person no harm, and dies either from the want of food or by starvation, or escapes from the body, or secretes itself where it may safely await the creation of decomposing matter, when it will begin its life-work.
Thus, there may be and doubtless is at all times a great variety of bacteria of a virulent type, quiescent in our bodies only for the time that they find no decaying matter adapted to their special tastes or wants.