Treatise on cholera asphyxia, or epidemic cholera, as it appeared in Asia, and more recently in Europe. With practical remarks on the disease in Europe, an appendix of cases, and the reports and regulations of the Boards of Health of London and Edinburgh / by George Hamilton Bell.

  • Bell, George Hamilton.
Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Treatise on cholera asphyxia, or epidemic cholera, as it appeared in Asia, and more recently in Europe. With practical remarks on the disease in Europe, an appendix of cases, and the reports and regulations of the Boards of Health of London and Edinburgh / by George Hamilton Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    gress of the disease. It reached Cuddalore on the 14th November, Madura on the 30th of the same month, and Cape Comorin by the Ist of January 1819. The disease is said to have been transported in vessels from Palameotta to Ceylon. It first ap- peared in Ceylon, in the middle of December 1818, at Jafnapatam, but only when it had reached the latitude of that place on the peninsula of India; whereas it did not prevail at Palamcotta until January 1819. But, on the supposition that Cholera may be car- ried in this manner, it certainly is not a little re- markable that it should not have been brought from _ Calcutta fifteen months earlier, by some of the many trading vessels constantly passing between Calcutta and Trincomalee, in the island of Ceylon. Such incontrovertible facts as these, seem to justify the conclusion, that this disease is regulated by laws of its own, and that contagion, strictly so called, will not account for its spread. But those writers who have so zealously maintained that the disease is pure- ly contagious, adduce two instances of its supposed communication in that manner, which they represent as conclusive. ‘They say, in the first place, ‘That the disease was carried from Ceylon to Port Louis, in the Isle of France, by the 'Topaze frigate ; and, secondly, That it was carried by country vessels from Bombay to Muscat, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf. It may be observed in the outset, that, if this dis- ease be of the highly contagious and communicable character contended for, it is not a little extraordinary, that, at the end of fourteen years, no more than two instances are to be found of the supposed conveyance of the disease by sea; while it is notorious, that, du- ring all that time, there have been no quarantine re-