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THE CAUSES OF DISEASE. 277
yards, which poisons all around them. Many parts of
London are pestiferous from this cause. Our own
cities are not free from it. Every grave-yard poisons
the atmosphere around it. All dead bodies should be
burned, and their ashes preserved in beautiful urns. In
nor become
this way, they would not poison the living,
losithsome to die senses and imagination.
A calcined
or body weighs only eight ten ounces.
This poison of animal putrefaction is sometimes so
viruler-.t, that the slightest inoculation with it, by the prick
of a needle, or the cut of a scalpel, produces death.
This not unfrequently happens
in tho dissection of a
human body, which is no worse than any
body, only as it is more commonly diseased.
other animal
Tea, coffee, alcohol, opium, tobacco, all stimulants,
and all narcotic poisons
in habitual use, are causes of dis
ease, both by the stimulation and consequent exhaustion
of the nervous system, and by their as mor
presence,
bid or diseasing matters in the system. The system
of an old tea or coffee drinker becomes saturated with
these infusions.
Alcohol fills all the tissues of the inebriate,
so as
sometimes to render his whole body a subject of spon
taneous combustion. In tho water-cure, we have pa
tients from whom opium and tobacco are thrown out
for weeks together, in such as to stain sheets
quantities
and bandages and poison the atmosphere around them.
Closely allied to these, as causes of disease, are the
poisonous drugs administered as medicines. These are
all, vegetable and mineral, poisonous. Every substance
taken into the stomach is one of three things. It is food
or drink; it is merely inert foreign matter, with no
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