The cholera not to be arrested by quarantine: a brief historical sketch of the great epidemic of 1817, and its invasions of Europe in 1831-2 and 1847: with practical remarks on the treatment, preventive and curative, of the disease / [Gavin Milroy].

  • Milroy, Gavin, 1805-1886.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cholera not to be arrested by quarantine: a brief historical sketch of the great epidemic of 1817, and its invasions of Europe in 1831-2 and 1847: with practical remarks on the treatment, preventive and curative, of the disease / [Gavin Milroy]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    states that “ it (the Influenza) has proved to be a true herald of the Epidemic Cholera in many places and the latter says— “ The Influenza of 1831 was immediately followed by the Indian Cholera ; and scarcely had this, after its revival in eastern and central Europe, vanished, when the Influenza of 1833 appeared.” He then mentions the co-existence of the two in 1837. The experience of the present year will be found to afford confirmation of the same fact. Not to mention the unusual prevalence of low fever, diarrhoea and other gastro-intestinal affections, in very many countries on the continent as well as in our own land—a subject to which we shall presently advert more particularly—it is well known that, during the last and present months (November and December), there has been a great deal of Influenza in its varied forms, both among ourselves and in different districts abroad. For example, it was only the other day that it was stated in the public newspapers, that it was so general in Copenhagen and other parts of Denmark that scarcely a person had escaped. At the same time, several'tftWns <in the south of France were suffer¬ ing severely from it. '-In Marseilles alone more than one-half the population was affected. In Paris, too, the grippe (as the French call the disease) has been unusually prevalent. I need not say how universal it has been over London, and in many other parts BfSt&fr&f ,noifnJiiii ohJaag sieves dona yd After this brief sketch of a disease whose history, in more respects than one, presents a striking analogy to that with which we are more immediately concerned, the reader will, I trust, be better en¬ abled to follow mein the examination of the very important ques¬ tion—How is the epidemic cholera conveyed from one part or region of the world to another ? And here I cannot but remark in limine that very much of the error and misconception, which have prevailed on this subject, has arisen from the contracted and unwise manner in which it has been looked at. It has been far too gene¬ rally supposed that there can be only two views of the question under consideration, and that one alone of these can be right, the other being consequently wrong;—either that the disease is in¬ fectious,* and therefore that its diffusion is owing to its being * I need scarcely say that Cholera is not contagious—using this word in its proper sense of “communicable by contact”—and that scarcely any one now holds the extravagant notion of its ever being transmitted by fornites.