The best preparation for the cholera : being an address to the inhabitants of London and of the kingdom at large / by a Clergyman.

  • Dow William.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The best preparation for the cholera : being an address to the inhabitants of London and of the kingdom at large / by a Clergyman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    this diocese, chief spiritual watchman over the city, has urged upon his clergy attention to the circumstances of their several localities. The benevolent have exerted themselves to extend the means and facilities of cleanliness for those who have hitherto been too little able to command them. The public prints are filled with suggestions of the proper medicines and treatment for such as may be attacked by the disease or exposed to it. Our medical men are ready to devote themselves to the sick, and to offer up their lives if it shall be necessary to save our lives or to mitigate our sufferings. And it becomes every one who regards the well-being of his fellow-men, if he can do anything either to prevent the calamity, or to alleviate it, or to comfort those who fall under it, to do so with his might and timeously. But, best of all, we shall do a good deed, if we can say anything that will enable you to meet this visitation with a quiet mind, that so you may contentedly submit to it, being neither excited by fear, nor troubled with anxiety, nor driven about by despair, but, when you have made such preparations as the prudent and experienced shall have advised, being able to witness its stroke, or to suffer from it, with calmness, looking with equanimity upon life or death as alike the will of your merciful and reconciled God. For such visitations as that of which we stand at present in dread are always rendered doubly destructive by an unreasoning panic which goes before, and accompanies them. For one whom the disease has prostrated, you may be sure that two are overcome by the passion of fear. To hinder, or to remedy this panic, were a great national benefit — a saving of human life. But to convert it into cheerfulness and peace were something better still—a worthy object of the highest philanthropy. Now, it is remarkable enough that the precautionary measures proposed to us, and which all agree in recommending, are summed up in this—cleanness — cleanness of your persons, cleanness of your houses and apartments, cleanness of your streets, courts, and neighbourhoods,, removal of all foul and hurtful air, and introduc- tion as much as may be of the pure air of heaven. And the moral precautions are, that you be temperate and sober, avoiding and denying yourselves to every thing that excites, or exhausts, or agitates, living in peace and free from anxiety. And this bodily and external treatment, and proper posture and condition of the mind, are already a light for us as to the deeper spiritual preparation. Moral cleanness, freedom from guilt, freedom