RESULTS.
Omitting, necessarily, many minor but yet important details, I close
the description of the imaginary health city. I have yet to indicate
what are the results that might be fairly predicted in respect to the
disease and mortality presented under the conditions specified.
Two kinds of observation guide me in this essay: one derived from
statistical and sanitary work; the other from experience, extended now
over thirty years, of disease, its phenomena, its origins, its causes,
its terminations.
I infer, then, that in our model city certain forms of disease would
find no possible home, or, at the worst, a home so transient as not
to affect the mortality in any serious degree. The infantile diseases,
infantile and remittent fevers, convulsions, diarrhoea, croup,
marasmus, dysentery, would, I calculate, be almost unknown. Typhus
and typhoid fevers and cholera could not, I believe, exist in the
city except temporarily, and by pure accident; small-pox would be
kept under entire control; puerperal fever and hospital fever would,
probably, cease altogether; rheumatic fever, induced by residence
in damp houses, and the heart disease subsequent upon it, would
be removed. Death from privation and from purpura and scurvy would
certainly cease. Delirium tremens, liver disease, alcoholic phthisis,
alcoholic degeneration of kidney and all the varied forms of
paralysis, insanity, and other affections due to alcohol, would
be completely effaced.
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