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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    necessarily infectious may become so under certain unsalutary circumstances; and, on the other hand, that infection may act an occasional and very subordinate part in the diffusion of an epi¬ demic which is recognised by all writers, without exception, to depend upon a certain (unknown indeed) atmospheric malaria. Ought not these two great facts to be steadily borne in mind, when we undertake to discuss the question as to the mode in which the Asiatic Cholera has spread over the world ? It is not enough to be able to adduce a few cases where the disease seemed to have been communicated from person to person, or conveyed from place to place. This may have been the case; I am not either willing or careful to contradict the statement; for it cer¬ tainly is far from being improbable that human communication has, in a degree, although a very partial one, had something to do with the dispersion of the disease;—perhaps in a manner not jfc jq fiTCi Vlfi^8DQ91I n fiQ-TtiOOTiru altogether dissimilar from that in which the seeds of certain plants, although doubtless scattered over the wide surface of the earth, are universally found to follow the footsteps of man wherever he settles. The admission that man, the recipient and victim or the ,7v X morbific miasm, may be made a subordinate agent in its dissemi- ■.XToenan ttJJ9T3JTI9 8Bti 98139310 8IflJ 190011 U niHJOuJSl.il . £ nation, goes very little way to settle the main point at issue ; tor it is obvious that all the while the atmosphere may be the grand channel and medium by which it is diffused ; and it would be j UjU3JuUj 9u JgJJ 1X1 jl' ,89V133uO YijSXJr Y19y . quite as reasonable to build a general argument in a great medical question upon a few isolated and irregular examples, as for a pilot to judge of the wind by the mere vane on the vessel’s side, without ever lifting his eye to watch the course and aspect of the clouds; or for one engaged in surveying a line of coast to mark the eddies along the shore, and neglect to trace the currents of the ocean stream. Yet, has not such been too often the case with many medical writers on the subject of our present enquiry ? Having witnessed one, twro, or more instances which, to them, seemed to be unequivocally infectious, they have forthwith sought to estab¬ lish a general conclusion, and tried to make out that personal transmission has been the great, if not the only, agent in the dissemination of the disease. This idea once adopted, the most recalcitrant facts have been tortured into submission, while others, which could neither be gainsaid nor resisted, have been