Samuel C. Busey Gathering, Packing, Transportation and Sale of Fresh Vegetables and Fruits

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The cause is often something more tangible and gustatory than the foetid and subtle emanations which hygienists have striven so long to define and to circumscribe. I am disposed to shield Providence from the alleged agency in the causation of many of the ills which flesh is heir to, and to ascribe them to the indulgence of our own insatiate thirst and fondness for the good things of this world. Even among very young children, the intestinal diseases are frequently directly traceable to the ingestion of unwholesome fruits and vegetables; noris the nursling exempt from the danger, even though the deleterious influence may only reach it through the defective milk supply of the mother feeding upon immature or deteriorated vegetables and fruits. In this connection, permit me, briefly, to call your attention to a few admitted facts. Not that I wish to use them to maintain any exclusive doctrine of causation, or to construct any new theory, but rather to extend the field of inquiry, and to direct your studies away from a too exclusive consideration of the very prevalently received opinions and theories in regard to the ever fermenting and wide spreading agency of bad smelling, impure and foul exhalations, as the chief and segregate cause of summer intestinal diseases.<br><br>Intestinal diseases, both among adults and children, are comparatively rare in the farming regions, and both classes of the rural population, adult and infantile, are more generally consumers of fruits and vegetables, and suffer less detriment therefrom, than like classes of the population of cities. Far the larger proportion of infantile intestinal diseases occurs among those beyond the age of six months, that is, subsequent to the period at which the natural aliment is usually considered by the laity adequate to the demands of growth and development; and far the larger percentage of mortality occurs among the children of the poor and squalid residents of cities - the class nec