A NEGLECTED DISINFECTANT.
When the household of our grandmothers was threatened with infection, the common practice was to sprinkle brimstone on a hot shovel or on hot coals on a shovel, and carry the burning result through the house. But now this simple method of disinfecting has gone out of fashion without any good and sufficient reason. The principal reason is neither good nor sufficient, viz., that nobody can patent it and sell it in shilling and half-crown bottles.
On September 18th last, M. d’Abbadie read a paper at the Academy of Sciences on “Marsh Fevers,” and stated that in the dangerous regions of African river mouths immunity from such-fevers is often secured by sulphur fumigations on the naked body. Also that the Sicilian workers in low ground sulphur mines suffer much less than the rest of the surrounding population from intermittent fevers. M. Fouqué has shown that Zephyria (on the volcanic island of Milo or Melos, the most westerly of the Cyclades), which had a population of 40,000 when it was the centre of sulphur-mining operations, became nearly depopulated by marsh fever when the sulphur-mining was moved farther east, and the emanations prevented by a mountain from reaching the town. Other similar cases were stated.
It is well understood by chemists that bleaching agents are usually good disinfectants; that which can so disturb an organic compound as to destroy its color, is capable of either arresting or completing the decompositions that produce vile odors and nourish the organic germs or ferments which usual accompany, or, as some affirm, cause them. Sulphurous acid is, next to hypochlorous acid, one of the most effective bleaching agents within easy reach.
I should add that sulphurous acid is the gas that is directly formed by burning sulphur. By taking up another dose of oxygen it becomes sulphuric acid, which, combined with water, is oil of vitriol. The bleaching and disinfecting action of the sulphurous acid is connected with its activity in appropriating the oxygen which is loosely held or being given off by organic matter. Chlorine and hypochlorous acid (which is still more effective than chlorine itself) act in the opposite way, so do the permanganates, such as Condy’s fluid, etc. They supply oxygen in the presence of water. It is curious that opposite actions should produce like results. A disquisition on this and its suggestions would carry me beyond the limits of a note.