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.

    99/268 (page 81)
    in this sense, Cholera is contagious, and still more if there be any foundation for the notion that contagion is the sole cause of the dissemination of this pestilence, neither individual risk, nor the sacrifice of a whole town or district, ought to prevent the shutting up of the disease in any place into which, by misfortune or negligence, it has been imported. If, on the other hand, the disease be non-contagious, or if something more than mere contact or communication be neces- sary in order to bring the verus into operation, no one can seriously doubt that rigorous quarantine re- gulations and sanitary cordons are worse than useless, © The supporters of contagion in Cholera have in- variably taken it for granted, that the disease com- menced at Jessore, about seventy miles to the north- east of Calcutta; and they trace it to the local un- healthiness of Jessore, and to the poverty and fish diet of the inhabitants. But we have seen that the dis- ease truly did noé commence at Jessore. No doubt when it broke out at that place, the poverty of the inhabitants, and the unhealthiness of the town, ren- dered it so fatal as to bring its existence prominently before the public, and thus led to the belief that it had been generated in this town, and carried by con- tagion from it as a centre. ‘There is, however, no foundation for this hypothesis. On the contrary, the disease had commenced six weeks before, at the places already mentioned ; and it is not a little remarkable, that, on its first appearance in the summer of 1817, it broke out simultaneously at several places in the Bengal territory, at the distance of many hundred miles from each other, whereas, ever since, its march has been progressive; and, since 1817, 1 know of no instance on land in which the disease has made its F