Asiatic cholera : an inquiry into its nature, and how to deal with it.

  • Pairman, Robert.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Asiatic cholera : an inquiry into its nature, and how to deal with it. 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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    it treats, we, alas, if we must be true to nature, dare not depict the grim features of disease in sucli rich attire. A lecture especially on the causes of infectious and epidemic diseases, cannot fail to acquire a flavour, or rather let me say, to catch an infection, from those very noxious diseases themselves, with which it is obliged to come in contact. My subject, indeed, compels me to tell you something both about odours and vegeta- tion generally. And these, you may think, will refresh the mind, like occasional green spots in some desert route. But these odours, unfortunately, to say the least of them, have none of the aroma of the myrtle or the rose ! And the vegetation we have to contemplate this night, is not the vegetation which blooms in your fields, and perfumes, by its fragrance, your gardens and your bowers; but only the vegetation which stagnates in your marshes, and corrupts by its breath the atmosphere around. But whether attractive or not, it would be impossible, I think, in the whole range of medical science, to select a subject more worthy of your serious consideration, than that of epidemic influence, and those noxious effluvia of various kinds, which experience teaches us to be the prolific fountains and sources of disease. This will appear, if we consider for a moment, the long catalogue of diseases, to which these noxious influences give rise; the very serious and alarming character of the diseases them- selves; the rapidity with which they sometimes sweep over a district or a country ; the vast number of households they invade, and hearths that they leave desolate and mourning; and, above all, if we consider the fact, now so well and clearly established, that Providence has granted, even to feeble man, the power, in a great measure, of grappling with these formidable maladies— the means of doing something in the way of resisting their inva- sion—of mitigating their ravages—in a word, of stripping these destroying angels of some of their terrors, and arresting them in their onward devastating career. I am extremely sorry, that even in such an audience as this, it is necessary, at the very outset, to present the symptoms of Asiatic Cholera, in all their naked fearfulness, before you. For the truth