The Earth in Relation to the Preservation and Destruction of Contagia, being the Milroy Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in 1899, together with other Papers on Sanitation

Abstract

THIS book is the work of an enthusiast, but to find fault with enthusiasm in these days of rapid progress and fresh discoveries would be unwise. Mr. Rider Haggard, with his watchword “Back to the Land,” and Sir Seymour Haden, with his advocacy of “superficial and coffinless burial,” are both enthusiasts. Who will venture to say that Mr. Rider Haggard or Sir Seymour Haden or Dr. Vivian Poore are idle dreamers? None dare say this, and if in some directions the writer of this review ventures to dissent from Dr. Poore's conclusions, it must be understood that he does so in a spirit of tolerant sympathy with the author's main contentions. 1 In the first six chapters, the distinguished author seeks to show that such diseases as tetanus, anthrax, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera, Malta fever, malaria and enteric fever have not been proved to be “soil diseases” in the proper sense of the term. That is, that the prominent part assigned to soil in the spread of disease among human beings is largely speculative in character. At the same time, the author freely admits that contaminated soil may occasionally (accidentally, as it were) be the means of causing isolated attacks or even localised outbreaks of certain diseases. Nevertheless, he refuses to regard the soil as a “breeding ground” for pathogenic microbes or as capable of exerting any sustained power of spreading disease. On the contrary, he considers the soil effective in bringing about the dissolution of harmful germs. The Earth in Relation to the Preservation and Destruction of Contagia, being the Milroy Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in 1899, together with other Papers on Sanitation. By George Vivian Poore (Lond.), F.R.C.P. Pp. 257. (London-Longmans, Green and Co., 1902.)