The early seats of cholera in India, and in the east : with reference to the past and the present / by John Macpherson.

  • John Macpherson
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The early seats of cholera in India, and in the east : with reference to the past and the present / by John Macpherson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ward so prominentl7, as pilgrims undoubtedly frequently carry back cholera with them from Juggernath—it may be well to point out that Calcutta and Lower Bengal generally lie out of the main track of pilgrims. Pilgrims passing by Gya, Deoghur, Bancorah, and Midnapore to Juggernath keep quite clear of Calcutta; and in the year 1818, in par- ticular, the Bengal Report says, “ Of late the disease has appeared much in the south-west parts of Bengal, visiting severely Midnapore and Cuttack, which it almost spared in the first year of its existence.’^ Lower Bengal, indeed, has scarcely any places of pilgrimage; and Kali Ghat in Cal- cutta, and Saugor Island at the mouth of the Hooghly, attract a comparatively small number of votaries. So far, then, as we are able to throw any light on the question of how the cholera outbreak of 1817 originated ; it is very plain that the disease did not come up, as in 1781, from Cuttack ; it is also clear that it first appeared in the upper part of the delta of the Ganges, nay, probably north of it; it possibly may have come down the Gangetic valley to Bengal. But our in- formation as to the presence of cholera in Upper India at that time is too scanty to help us in the solution of the question. Certain it is that cholera in its worst epidemic form was fairly introduced into Bengal in 1781, but, for some reason unknown to us, did not fructify then, as it has done since 1817 ; and it is probable that if introduced at all in that year, it was entirely from a different quarter from that from which the visitation of 1781 had come. In 1817 both Europeans and natives had almost forgotten the former epidemic. So soon is the memory of such things lost. Yet in a certain sense the disease cannot be said to have been a new one in 1817 in Bengal, for we have seen that cases of it had been occurring occasionally from the begin- ning of the century. Dr. Macrae, writing from Chittagong, informed the Medical Board that he had had occasion to observe the disease, as it prevailed in his district more or less every hot season. Indeed, the Board itself in its early communications to Government, assured it that the malady was only an aggravated form of the usual epidemic of the season, though they did not in the first instance apply the name of cholera to it. No question in medicine is more interesting than that of an endemic disease taking on the character of an epidemic, and of the behaviour of an endemic, when its own epidemic form reaches it. Returning to our earlier ground in Western India, Dr. B
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