Even that small body, the Bavarian Parliament, loses one or
more of its members every year from the same disease and yet these men
are more favorably situated than almost any others as regards
protective circumstances. So patent is the danger, and so many are the
instances of disease contracted during a short stay in the capital and
carried away to spread contagion in remote places, that frequently
persons chosen to honorable and lucrative official positions refuse to
accept because, in order to hold such situations, they must reside
temporarily or entirely in Munich. Finally, the general unhealthiness
of Munich cannot be questioned, since statistics show that nearly
fifty per cent, of the children born there die in infancy, and that
the death-rate for the whole population is nearly forty in a thousand.
But is there no help for this state of things? The foregoing account
of the principal causes of disease suggests naturally the means of at
least partial cure for the accumulated evils under which the benighted
city is suffering. It is true that the climate must always be
unfavorable to persons of a certain constitution, but its bracing air
is a tonic to those who are able to bear it, and its fierce winds
serve to sweep away many an impurity. It is true, also, that the soil
must always be in some degree a manufactory of injurious effluvia, and
that the vicinity of that long strip of marshy bottom known as the
English Garden must continue to be a source of mischief; but if the
dead had never been buried in the neighborhood of the town, and if the
excreta of the living had not from the beginning until how been
allowed to corrupt the air and the water, the occasional prevalence of
vegetable miasma would give comparatively little trouble.
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