1893-1894 - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

192 APPENDIX.
gates, and sacrifices to Moloch will not sutKce.
He must be driven from
the home and destroyed. Don't temporize; clean up your premises, as
well as your house, and keep them clean.
Sickness and death cost more in money than the
time or the articles
you lose, and who can measui-e the cost of weary days and nights of
watching, or fix the loss that sorrow and grief entail?
Let me conclude my tax upon your time and patience by reciting to
you the history of three cases of yellow fever that occurred during the
Jacksonville epidemic.
you.
It contains all the lessons I have sought to teach
Dr. John Guiteras, of the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the
best yellow fever experts in the country, as well as a most intelligent
and cultivated i)hysician and ])athologist. He was formerly one of the
surgeons of the Marine Hospital Service, and is yet, during his vacations,
on the staff of that splendid department. He was present during the epidemic
alluded to, and told me the fact I am about to relate. A certain
man lived in Jacksonville for the greater part of the year, but had a country
home thirty or forty miles from the city and a large saw-mill a few
miles further on. He found that he was infected by the fever, and escaped
l)v private conveyance, passing the cordon around the town and the
detention in the camp which had been established for the observation
and care of ])ersons leaving the stricken place. He rode in his buggy
to home in the country, sick with the j'ellow fever. His wife was a
bright, intelligent woman, and among her many charming traits and virtues
one of the best was a persistent determination to keep her home and
its surroundings clean. She had succeeded, and the advent of her gudeman,
laden with the germs of the terrible disease, made no disturbance
in his home. Before his convalescence was complete he went down to
his mill and had a relapse. The condition of things there was just the
opposite of those existing at his home. He was domiciled and sick in a
small house occupied and kept by one of his emploj^ees and his family.
The refuse of the kitchen, the garbage from the house, the excreta of the
inmates, those of the sick man included, were carelessly thrown in the
immediate neighborhood of the house. The man grew worse, and one
of the inmates of the house was attacked with a suspicious sickness,
and Dr. Guiteras was sent for, and on his way went by and stopped at
the home of the mill owner. About the time of his arrival at the mill
the third person was attacked, and he immediately recognized in the
two new cases the outbreak of yellow fever. Fortunately they all recovered,
and the disease was stopped witli these three cases. But mark the
moral of the story. The sick man from Jacksonville goes first to his
own home, mingling freely with the inmates of his house for several
davs, and grows better of disease. He is in a clean house, situated on
clean premises, thanks to his most excellent wife. No one of his family