Excerpt from The Control of Communicable Diseases in South Australia

As to how the diseases, commonly called infectious, contagious, or communicable, first appeared in the human race, we can only speculate 'or theorise. We know, however, something definite about how these diseases spread from person to person and from place to place. And this knowledge, although in many cases limited and fragmentary, is of the sort that proves of very great practical value, since it enables us to control, to a greater or lesser extent, the spread of these maladies.

Formerly these diseases, like hurricanes, or earthquakes, or inundations, devastated a country and defied control, because people had no knowledge as to Whether there was any regularity in the way in which epidemics of them appeared, waxed, waned, died out, and reappeared. Now, however, we have the means of finding out something about the infective material, how and where it grows, how it is conveyed from person to person and from place to place, and how it can be destroyed or limited in its action. We can deal with some diseases in much the same way as we deal with plants. We can cultivate them in human beings or other animals, regulate their distribution, modify their viru lence, or so change the human soil in which they are accustomed to grow that they can no longer flourish or even take root in it. Like many other processes of fermentation - for they are reallv so-they have ceased from being our masters and have become subject to us.

The human mind, in its attitude towards communicable diseases, has long oscillated, and even now on occasion alternates, between panic and apathy. A knowledge of the modes m which these diseases spread, and of the means and methods of prevent ing or controlling them should go far, very far, to remove the unreasonable fears that so long possessed people in the presence of an epidemic, or even of a single case of illness. We do not, like some savage races, kill the victims who are attacked by the disease and burn the bodies and the belongings. We need not prohibit all commerce, or forbid all intercourse with a cholera infected or a plague-stricken country, or even impose a 40-days' imprisonment or isolation on all persons coming from it. There is no occasion to become alarmed for our own or other people's safety when we read of 'persons suffering from infectious disease being taken through the public streets in ordinary conveyances without any special precautions, so far as alarmists can see. In these days of efiective disinfection, and of Health Acts which permit efficient isolation and control, we do not need to resort to shot-gun quarantine, nor need we clamor for general and com pulsory cremation of the dead and imprisonment of the living.

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