Volume 1

A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds.

Date:
1866-1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    167/976 (page 147)
    examined tlie air in the epidemic of 1853-54. The two former made an extensive series of observations at St. Thomas s Hospital. Although all these observers found organic forms in abundance, they did not discover any special cause for Cholera in those organisms.. Never- theless, there seems much that is attractive in the cryptogamic theory of the disease, and the whole subject derives additional interest from the late researches of Pasteur. Valuable information on this subject might be afforded by investigations made in India during the presence and absence of Cholera epidemics. The. writer of this has often regretted that he never had leisure to undertake such investigations. Many of the phenomena observed during the march of Cholera epidemics might be explained much more satisfactorily upon the supposition of the exciting cause being masses of organisms moving in obedience to atmospheric impulses and currents, than by most other theories. They might multiply wherever they found a fitting nidus, which might be in privy atmospheres, or in air abounding in emanations from decaying and putrefying matter, or in crowded rooms, and, indeed, all vitiated atmospheres. They might appear to impart an infecting character to the choleraic discharges by multiply- ing enormously in them. After allowing all possible latitude to the dissemination of Cholera by human intercourse, which may include the diffusion by gaseous emanations acting directly through the atmosphere, or through fomites, or the diffusion through the Cholera evacuations, it appears that we are still unable to explain all the facts of its origin in a place, and its spread over the land. Summarily we may say that we shall still want an explanation of those facts which show that Cholera will arise without the possibility of tracing any communication with the sick, or with fomites or choleraic discharges. It cannot be said that the supposition of a poison, cloud, or miasm, spreading through the land will account satisfactorily for all the phenomena, either such as its strange limitation to certain areas, or its passing over a town on its apparent track, leaving it unscathed, or nearly so, to show itself violently in some place beyond the town so spared. The only way in which this capricious action could be accounted for, would be on the supposition ol clouds of matter or of fungi or infusoria, limited in their spread by atmospheric currents, sometimes compressed into vertical strata and touching the earth in a thin line or belt only, or lifted upwards by some upward atmospheric movement, and thus being above the places passed over. But though it would be possible to conceive this mode ol progression of a mass of organisms obeying the impulses of the atmosphere, yet no such organisms have been hitherto demonstrated