The human body
gradually accommodates itself to unhealthful circumstances, so that
people can live a long time in bad air. But the "reserve power" of the
body, that is, the power of resisting disease, is under such
circumstances gradually destroyed, and then an epidemic easily sweeps
away those thus enfeebled. The plague of London, that destroyed
thousands every day, came immediately after a long period of damp,
warm days, when there was no wind to carry off the miasma thus
generated; while the people, by long breathing of bad air, were all
prepared, from having sunk into a low vitality, to fall before the
pestilence.
Multitudes of public documents show that the fatality of epidemics is
always proportioned to the degree in which impure air has previously
been respired. Sickness and death are therefore regulated by the degree
in which air is kept pure, especially in case of diseases in which
medical treatment is most uncertain, as in cholera and malignant fevers.
Investigations made by governmental authority, and by boards of health
in this country and in Great Britain, prove that zymotic diseases
ordinarily result from impure air generated by vegetable or animal
decay, and that in almost all cases they can be prevented by keeping
the air pure.
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