Cholera : a practical study as well as a personal experience / by W. Curran.

  • Curran, William, 1927-
Date:
[1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cholera : a practical study as well as a personal experience / by W. Curran. 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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    CHOLERA;. A PRACTICAL STUDY AS WELL AS : a personal experience. ffiAOVGH I have ^)pthing that is either very new or very Startling to say, about this much discussed disease, yet HkJe I se^n much of and heard more about it in my time, an<J a well-known writer1 has truly said that “There is atwkys something to be learned from everyone if you touch them dm.the,paints they know.” Influenced by this con- sideratibri.- as -cv?ell as by the fact that though this scourge has been talked about and commented on since the era of Aretseus and Hippocrates,2 downwards to these our own days, yet that its cause and mode of propagation are almost as much sub-judice now as they were then, while the resources of civilization are confessedly powerless against its ravages, there is, I think, room for one more short dissertation of a practical character on the point. This must necessarily resolve itself, as far as I am concerned, into a review of my own personal recollections of the out- breaks of it I have seen or heard of locally, and of such general deductions from these as the situation itself may warrant or suggest. Any or such attempt as would aim at exhausting the etiological relations of this complaint within the limits at my command, would clearly defeat its own object. Every conceivable cause has been assigned at one time or another, according to locality, association, and temperature, for its origination and diffusion. Contagion, infection, impure water, tainted air, over-crowding or defective ventilation, lowness of site and inadequacy of provender,3 dampness, drought, dirt, and the dispersion of infected sewage through the atmosphere. The effluvia from decomposing 1 The Greville Memoirs, vol. i, p. 234. 2 The writer of the article Cholera, in James’ Medical Dictionary, Lond., 1745, says that “among the ancients, Caelius Aurelianus, and Aretaeus have given the most distinct account of this disease.” 3 All these and many others are given as causes of cholera in the ordinary text-books, and describing the epidemic that devastated the camp of the Marquis of Hastings, in Bundelkund, in November, 1817, Mr. Prinsep says (History of the Political and Military Transac- tions „ . . of the Marquis of Plastings, vol. 2, p. 108,) that “the year was one of scarcity, and grain had been collected with extreme difficulty. That part ... on which the division was encamped