Sickness and Health in St. Andrews
It is interesting as kind of index of how far we have come in our understanding and treatment of disease to glance over the old newspapers and observe their concerns, fears, triumphs and failures in this department. As with fires and other events, such as hotel construction, this subject also provides much incidental information about the Town itself: the names of doctors, their houses and offices, the sanitary condition of the Town, its dumps and tolerance or intolerance of public nuisances such as manure and compost heaps, the running at large of animals, and so on. When all is said and done, St. Andrews seems to have come off fairly well in the battle against the ship-borne diseases such as cholera. The larger centers more visited by vessels such as Saint John fared worse. I include also a section in which death--in the form of scarlatina and tuberculosis--visits the family of Adam Smith of the Standard. And also a section on hay fever, which until the discovery of its cause was sometimes though to be something of a fad or affectation.