Reflections on cholera / by Alexander Hamilton Howe, M.D.

  • Howe, Alexander Hamilton.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reflections on cholera / by Alexander Hamilton Howe, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    since the Christian era. This would be a task far beyond the limits I have proposed to myself in this brief memoir. The curious reader will find the above state- ments amply confirmed, so far as concerns the modern statistics of the concurrence of epidemics and epizootics, by Sir William R. Wylde ; Census of Ireland for the year 1851; Tables of Deaths, vol. i., 1856; also by all the other systematic writers on epidemic pestilence, such as Bascome, Noah Webster, Dr. Short, Villalba. Ozanam has even a separate article on the subject of epizootics, which veterinarian writers might consult with advantage. In conclusion, and to enforce my arguments by a very simple illustration, I cannot prevent the rising of the tide, but I can avoid building my house on the sand and within the influence of the tide, so that it shall not be swept away by it. In the same way I cannot prevent that state of the atmosphere which is favourable to the development and propagation of epidemic diseases and the epidemic poison, bat we can remove all those social and domestic sources in which the epidemic poison originates, by proper antici- patory sanitary precautions, and by so doing prepare our- selves for their invasion. We are not to suppose that an All-wise Providence has constructed the material universe with the necessary im- perfection that it is to be liable at certain times, from a faulty construction, to periodic visitations of epidemic pestilence ; but it is so constructed that if man does not