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
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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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    nature, and is readily conveyed by the atmosphere ; whence it aiises that there is little, if any, increase of danger from the most intimate communication with the sick during the prevalence of the disease, above that which attends the common intercourse of society.”* Several other passages from this gentleman’s work might be quoted to shew that, although an avowed infectionist, he considers that no quarantine, however stringent, will ever serve to keep out the pestilence. Truly, with such an opponent we are willing to overlook’ a few minor differences of opinion, and may surely claim to enlist him among the number of our most useful friends. Much stress has been laid by the ultra-infectionists upon the two circumstances, that the Cholera has often—certainly not always, as has been pretended—followed the chief routes or lines of human intercourse between points at a distance from each other, and that it has, on several occasions, first manifested itself in a place among persons recently arrived from an infected locality. I have already alluded to the first of these objections, and need not now recur to it; for unquestionably far too much importance has been attached to a circumstance which, even if it was universally true, proves but little in determining the main question. And, with respect to the second, I may merely remind the reader that the very same thing has been observed, over and over again, in the case of the Influenza, as well as of other epi¬ demic disorders ; and moreover that, in almost every instance which has been quoted in reference to the Cholera, the disease was, so to speak, at the very door,—nay, on some occasions, had already entered—where the unlucky individuals first attacked are supposed to have introduced the morbific poison. Such was memorably the case with the alleged importation of the malady into the Mauritius in 1819; and the history of the European visitation of 1831-2 so teems with proofs to the same effect that, even if space permitted, it would be almost useless to occupy the time of the reader with particular details. Indeed, my only reason for alluding to the matter now, is to direct his attention for a moment to the striking contrast which the migration or An Es?ay on the Epidemic Cholera. 2nd Edition. London, 1831, p. 313.