Effluvia

“ Other of Boyle’s fruitful principles (I am separating them out from amidst much other matter not specially related to influenza) are these:
“It is possible that these effluvia may be, in their own nature, either innocent enough, or at least not considerably hurtful, and yet may become very noxious if they chance to find the air already imbued with certain corpuscles fit to associate with them.”
Again, the effluvia sent up into the air may pass by certain places without causing an epidemic, because these “are not inhabited enough to make their ill qualities taken notice of ”

“ Bancroft, [156] that the effluvia which issue from putrefying human bodies are not capable of generating the specific contagious matter of Plague, Typhus, or any true pestilential fever, yet, but little reflection is necessary to lead any reasoning mind to the conclusion, that in the decomposition of the human body various noxious principles are developed highly injurious to human life. ”

“ It is well known that the carcases of all animals in a state of corruption fill the surrounding atmosphere with effluvia that are accompanied with an intolerable stench, and that these effluvia, though they do not produce the plague, are nevertheless the cause of putrid, malignant fevers. ”

“ For, although the numerous observations that have been made give us the strongest reason to think that human effluvia produce this disease, we have no right to infer that it cannot arise also from some other source. ”

“ He supposes the plague and other epidemics to depend on some secret constitution of the air, but pretends not to say what that constitution is. But, besides this constitution, he is of opinion that there must be another circumstance, viz. the receiving the effluvia or seminium from an infected person. Thus he supposes that a single infected person is sufficient to poison a whole country; the general mass of atmosphere being infected by the breath of the diseased and the effluvia of the dead bodies. ”

“ It appears, however, that these raging epidemics have consisted of different maladies in different instances, having been sometimes the Remittent Fever originating from marsh effluvia, and sometimes the true Plague, modified by circumstances and situations: even in our own times some doubt has existed respecting the true nature of the different pestilences which have raged in Europe. ”

“ That sewage farms, if too near to houses, and if not carefully conducted, may give off disagreeable effluvia is certain; but it is also clear that in some farms this is very trifling, and that when the sewer water gets on the land it soon ceases. It is denied by some persons that more nuisance is excited than by any other mode of using manure. As regards health, it has been alleged that these farms may—1st, give off effluvia which may produce enteric fever or dysentery, or some allied affection ”

“ They were attended with a most inodorous effluvia, and caused such a general concert of sneezing and coughing, by night as well as by day, that one would have thought influenza, in its most fearful shape and with giant power, had seized every man by the throat. ”

“ In some of the higher orders of the inferior animals, there is an astonishing acuteness of smell in regard to effluvia that come from living animals. To these animals, it possesses an importance in them far beyond what it has in man, by making them acquainted with the presence of their enemies or their prey, when the eye and ear are incapable of acting. ”

“ They are found growing in and upon both vegetables and animals. Nees von Esenbeck imagined, that minute forms multiplied themselves in the atmosphere; and really, when we consider the amount of effluvia composed of the atoms cast off from the bodies of living or decaying organic matters, which are incessantly passing into the atmosphere, the conjecture is not an unreasonable one. ”

“ For it is manifest that there is contagion, by the infected Effluvia or steams issuing from a diseased Body to another by which it may be contaminated, but otherwise there is no natural fascination, nor any agent in nature to produce that effect, and therefore there can be no Diabolical fascination at all. ”

“ The workmen only remain such so long as they are healthy, and as they become disabled they necessarily cease to rank among workmen. The decomposition of putrefying organic matters is unquestionably dangerous. The general doctrine of sanitation that filth is one of the chief factors in producing disease is certainly applicable to trade effluvia as well as to general sanitation. It has been alleged on behalf of such effluvia as chlorine sulphurous acid and tar vapours that they are useful disinfectants ”

“ THIS then being the Case of a Contagion, that a Person having a Fever, critically throws off poisonous Effluvia, which were generated during such irregular Motions of the animal Fluids, insomuch as to diffuse for some Distance round, what will infect other Persons within their reach; and that so many have got this Infection, that no Part of the Air, for some Tract of the Country together, is free from them; the poisonous Atmospheres, if they may be so termed, of the infected, extending and mixing into one universal, common Contagion ”

“ But a greater difficulty than that of all persons not being equally susceptible of the infection arises from233 the cessation of the plague, at a period when the supposed contagious effluvia, preserved in apparel, furniture, and other fomites, at the end of a pestilential season, must be allowed to exist, not only in a much greater quantity than can be supposed to be at once accidentally imported by commerce, but in a state also of universal dispersion over the city: the fact, however unaccountable, is unquestionably certain ”

“ The breath becomes foul and fetid, and the effluvia from the ulcerated surface, is very sickening to the patient and all around him. This disease rarely attacks adults, but occasionally, and for the last six or eight months, in one region where I am acquainted, where Scarlatina of a malignant type has prevailed among children, adults have been affected with an epidemic soreness of the mouth and throat, strongly resembling the worst form of the angina in malignant Scarlatina, together with a low typhoid form of fever. ”

“ There the Blue Herons breed in considerable numbers, and if the place they have chosen be over a swamp, few situations can be conceived more likely to ensure their safety, for one seldom ventures into those dismal retreats at the time when these birds breed, the effluvia being extremely injurious to health, besides the difficulties to be overcome in making one’s way to them. ”

“ It spreads from one person to another by contact. There is much reason to doubt, whether carrion introduced into the stomach produces this disease, though by some it is maintained that even the respiration of effluvia from putrescent substances produces malignant fever, with fetid evacuations and gangrenous patches on the skin. ”

“ If we suppose the plague, or any other epidemic disease, to arise from some general cause, let that cause be contagion or any thing else, it ought to operate upon all who come within its sphere of action, as Dr. Mosely observes of infection. If experience shows that it does not, the argument will hold equally against a constitution of the atmosphere, putrid effluvia, heat, cold, or any thing else ”

“ WHEN a Person therefore falls into a Fever from any epidemic, or other more private Cause, and that Fever rises to such a Degree of Malignity as is always supposed in a Pestilence, as far as any Effluvia do exhale from that Person, so far may he be said to have round him a contagious and poisonous Atmosphere; because there transpires from him such Particles as will excite in other Animals of like Constitution, the same fermentative Motions as those to which they owe their own Origin. ”

“ It is an excess in the number of pustules which we chiefly dread in the Small-pox; but, in the Cow-pox, no pustules appear, nor does it seem possible for the contagious matter to produce the disease from effluvia, or by any other means than contact, and that probably not simply between the virus and the cuticle; so that a single individual in a family might at any time receive it without the risk of infecting the rest, or of spreading a distemper that fills a country with terror. ”

“ One word for all; amulets, medicated or not, are precarious and uncertain; and, now a-day, are seldom resorted to, much less confided in.
Baglivi refines on the doctrine of effluvia, by ascribing his cures of the bite of the tarantula to the peculiar undulation any instrument or tune makes by its strokes in the air; which, vibrating upon the external parts of the patient, is communicated to the whole nervous system, and produces that happy alteration in the solids and fluids which so effectually contributes to the cure. ”

“ In such cases, an eruption of similar vesicles takes place on the hands and arms, not without much swelling and inflammation, and occasionally with fever and disturbance of the health for some days. It has never been known to prove fatal when thus communicated, or to have left any unpleasant effects behind 15it, except a few indented marks in the situation occupied by the pustules. It is not communicable, like small-pox in the human subject, by the effluvia ”

“ It has been long admitted that the effluvia which issue from these receptacles of human ordure are highly deleterious, and have been known to occasion a species of ophthalmia, diarrhæa, and dysentery, while in a more concentrated form these emanations have proved suddenly fatal, [166] by 101producing an affection named by the French Nosologists [167] the Plomb, or the Asphyxia of privies. M. Dupuytren has given us many particulars respecting this affection; sometimes the patients are strongly asphyxied, and death takes place in a very short period ”

“ Fever seems to have been perennial among them, the deaths from typhus having been 23 in 1772, 33 in 1773 and 35 in 1774. “In these poor habitations,” says Haygarth, “when one person is seized with a fever, others of the family are generally affected with the same fever in a greater or less degree.” It became rifer than usual in August, 1773, and attacked 285, proving fatal to 28, or to one in ten. It had the common symptoms of malignant fevers produced by human effluvia, and particularly affected the head with pain, giddiness and delirium. ”

“ One circumstance in the twenty ninth experiment peculiarly attracted my attention, viz. that the air in the bottle was so very putrid, though the beef exposed to it was restored to sweetness. The septic effluvium therefore did not appear to be destroyed, but to have changed place. From this fact it occurred to me that there might possibly be an affinity between the fixed air and the septic particles, and that this air [Pg 128] might act as a menstruum on the effluvia emitted by putrid bodies. ”

“ For as these Spirits, as before observed, are nitrous, and inflammable, by their Similitude to a pestilential Aura, they not only are fitted to receive, but even attract it, and provoke it into Union; as the Snuff of a Candle just blown out, if it is not too far off, will by an Affinity of Qualities be soon rekindled by another lighted one at some Distance; and how much soever the poisonous Qualities of the pestilential Effluvia may be destructive of the animal Spirits, yet there is nothing more certain, than that their Taint is very easily impressed upon them. ”

“ That the putrid effluvium will mix with water seems to be evident from the following experiment. If a mouse be put into a jar full of water, standing with its mouth inverted in another vessel of water, a considerable quantity of elastic matter (and which may, therefore, be called air) will soon be generated, unless the weather be so cold as to check all putrefaction. After a short time, the water contracts an extremely fetid and offensive smell, which seems to indicate that the putrid effluvium pervades the water, and affects the neighbouring air ”

“ They are never found in fresh rain water, but abundant in nearly every cistern. The office of infusoria is in water, that of the buzzard on land: they are scavengers, and purify the liquid by feeding upon the decaying matters it contains. But the microscope reveals to us in water, contaminated with sewerage, for instance, minute germs capable of motion, which, as in the case of the infusoria, live on the organic matter, but are believed to accompany if not to cause many forms of contagious disease, filling even the air, in times of epidemic. ”

“ There is an optima distance for the realisation of this effluvium. As a rule the effluvium appears denser when the fingers are fairly close together; as they move away the density diminishes; it becomes thinner and more attenuated. But if the hands cease to move, the effluvium disappears. This is the case as long as the tips of the fingers are not more than 2 to 3 centimetres away. If the movement of withdrawal ceases when the finger-tips are within 10 to 15 centimetres proximity, the effluvium remains visible for a longer time. ”

“ The point of rupture is important, but where so many alveoli are involved, disturbance of continuity will occur, occasionally in such position that the result will be the escape of air into the interstitial tissues. [7] There is ample evidence that this happens. Indeed, among the clinical manifestations of the disease, interstitial emphysema of the lung spreading through the fascial planes to the subcutaneous tissues of neck and thorax is well known; the phenomenon is more frequent and extensive in influenza than in any other disease (8, 17, 52, 143) . ”

“ For example, if light falls from one side upon a vessel full of water containing unicellular green algae, according to the intensity of the light these organisms swim either towards the illuminated side, where they form a compact mass on the edge of the vessel, or away from it, to cluster on the opposite edge. In the same way infusoria in water are observed to hasten towards or to flee from certain chemical substances, and leukocytes in our bodies act in the same manner towards the metabolic products of pus-forming bacteria which have penetrated into an open wound. ”