Reports and papers on cholera in England in 1893 / with an introduction by the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board.

  • Great Britain. Local Government Board.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reports and papers on cholera in England in 1893 / with an introduction by the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    13/374
    R E P 0 R T. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD. Sir, I BEG leave to submit to you, for presentation to Parliament, the following report on cholera in England during 1893. In my last report, which dealt with the proceedings of your Medical Department during the year ending Lady Day, 1893, I gave an account of the European epidemic of cholera during the year 1892, and I reported that, although 35 cases of cholera had reached our shores between August 25th and October 18th of that year, the disease liad in no case extended to any person beyond those arriving from abroad. This result, eminently satisfactory in itself, was not one which, under the then existing circumstances of Europe, could well be expected to repeat itself if cholera broke out anew in the following year ; and it was because of apprehensions of such recrudescence and of the strain to which our sanitary organisation, whether along our coast -line or inland, would thereby become subjected, that I urged upon the Board the institution of the Cholera Survey and that increase in the staft* of the Medical Department to which I have already referred iu my last report. The risk to England, in regard of cholera during 1892, had been in one sense limited by the concurrent operation of two factors. In the first place the disease, having travelled step by step across the continent of Europe, only reached our shores somewhat late in the season at which cholera most readily becomes epidemic in this latitude. And secondly, the impoided disease reached us direct from places, such as Hamburg, where it was in full vigour, and where the majority of persons who received the infection might be expected, on ariival in this country, to develop symptoms sufficiently typical of cholera to admit of the early recognition of the disease. But, in urging the adoption of special measures of precaution in anticipation of cholera in 1893, I took occasion to point out that if, with the advancing summer, recrudescences of the disease should take place in the ports and towns along the western littoral of the continent of Europe, we might have to face the risk of a series of importations extending over several months, instead of several weeks, of that period when cholera has, aforetime in England, tended to assume epidemic proportions. And not only so; I also expressed the opinion that if the cholera reached us in the early stages of any recrudescences in Western Europe, we sliould be exposed to the risk of the importation of mild attacks of the disease which it might be difficult to differentiate from attacks of that summer diarrhoea which is commonly prevalent with us year by year.