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Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941
518 REPORTS EXHIBITING THE PAST AND PRESENT
contaminated atmosphere of the crowded wards, which would have terminated in recovery elsewhere. Not only were the deadly emanations from concentrated disease ready to receive the patient, but his mind wandered to the crowded dead-house, and the prognosis of his own fate struck his mind at the same moment. This, in the majority of cases, was too faithful! How much it is to be regretted that there occurred any impediment to the prompt and efficient fulfilment of Dr. Fergusson's recommendation, at the earliest assaults of the disease, to isolate the cases, and to convey the uninfected men from contact with the diseased, by placing them in a floating hulk.
What were the immediate causes of the prevalence of disease during the last summer, and especially of that disease which decimated the 95th Regiment? It has been popularly conceived that the removal of earth, near the barracks, undisturbed since the Plutonic origin, of this island, did all the evil. Why then did the disease remain so long undeveloped after the evolution of its imputed cause? the precise nature of which I never heard explained. Was it a gas confined within the cells of the earth, in itself innocuous, and rendered poisonous by contact and combination with the free gases floating in the external air? The supposition is ungeological. The light of a little science will show the glimmering of causes more rational than that.
Electricity "exerts a most powerful influence upon the whole of the animal "and vegetable world, and this not merely through the meteorological processes, precipitations of watery vapour, of acids, or of ammoniacal compounds "which it occasions; but also immediately as the electrical force, that force "which excites the nerves, and occasions or assists the circulation of the 'juices."
The latitudes in which we live are peculiarly liable to thunder-storms, and the congregation of small islands, like those in these waters, surrounded by an extensive ocean, acts peculiarly on the atmosphere, and gives occasion to thunder-storms.
If those places in which lightning is common be compared with regions like Peru, where it is never seen, it will be found that evidences of the salubriousness of the latter are much greater than of the former.
The prevalence of electricity may be one of the proximate causes of local disease.
In the rear of the south range of the Hong Kong barracks there is swampy ground, saturated by the sluggish absorption of moisture from the gully above, and by occasional torrents, the waters of which rest on the surface of the table-land which terminates the ravine. This gully for many months was thickly colonized by Chinese workmen in temporary huts, whose filth descended and remained stagnant on the point alluded to, from which free gases would be perpetually evolved, ready to be elaborated into poisonous compounds, by a favourable stroke of electricity.
Epidemic diseases, however, do not necessarily derive their origin from external causes. The relative failure in the perfection of organic functions in an individual will give rise to unwholesome secretions and effluvia, which, coming in contact with the susceptible and favourable organism of another, may be the means of originating and propagating an epidemic.
1
The geological circumstances of this colony in many respects resemble that early condition of the globe which was suited only to living organization of a very low type. It is a mass of granite, disengulphed from the centre of the earth by ancient Plutonic causes. It is little to be wondered at that such a surface, affording no scope for that beautiful reciprocity which is so mutually beneficial between animal and vegetable respiration, and yielding only or chiefly such vegetable productions as are not refreshed by the fertilising existence and economy of herbivorous animals, but renewing itself by its own periodical decomposition, should possess abundant sources of unwholesome exhalations. While it is painful to reflect that these numerous sources of disease envelop us, it is gratifying to know that every step in the progress of civilization and refinement is a powerful antidote. In the planting of trees and shrubs, to unload the atmosphere of the carbonic acid gas, which is the product of animal respiration, and to replenish it with oxygen, which sustains and invigorates us, as well as to afford shade from the sun and a surface for the absorption of the intense rays of light conveyed to the brain through the eyes, which, not less than the direct rays of the sun's heat, tend to injure that organ, we discover a simple
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