Volume 1

On the extermination or annihilation of the Asiatic cholera. To the Right Hon. Viscount Melbourne, Secretary for the Home Department, &c / [Euphemizon].

  • Euphemizon, pseud.
Date:
[1832]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the extermination or annihilation of the Asiatic cholera. To the Right Hon. Viscount Melbourne, Secretary for the Home Department, &c / [Euphemizon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of which is maintained by all the writers on epidemic diseases ; even those on the plague and yellow fever, in which the exist¬ ence of contagion is warmly disputed, confirm the doctrine by well-accredited statements. They inform us, that in Egypt, Italy, &c., the plague has instantly abated or disappeared upon the falling of a heavy rain, or the sudden supervention of heat or cold ; and to persons not medical, the thought has often incidentally occurred, that a similar alteration might be effected by artificial means. Hume, vol. vii., p. 416, speaking of the great fire in London, says : 66 The plague, which used to break out with great fury twice or thrice every century, indeed was always lurking in some corner or other of the city, has scarcely ever appeared since that calamity.” It was a maxim with the Peripatetic philosophers, £f That the air is the universal cause, modified in its effects by subor¬ dinate causes nor, as we learn from the eradication of the endemic diseases, is the conception modern, that the air, cor¬ rupted by physical agents, may be divested of its deleterious qualities by agents of the same class ; but if any one contends that a limited insalubrity can supply no argument applicable to an unbounded noxiousness, I answer, that the air en¬ circling our globe never either was, or was ever imagined to be, totally and simultaneously in such a predicament; the en¬ demic and epidemic poisons coincide in having each a topical origin ; the most sensible difference between them is, that the one is stationary and the other migratory. The epidemifer- ous air leaves the attacked places sound, at least for a time ; so that at every stage of its journey it assumes the circum¬ scribed character of an endemic ; therefore whatever removes this internperies, at any one stage, will afford the best chance of its interception; and were the same means employed, wherever it has been, is, or shall be, there could be no doubt of its complete extinction. With these truths, likewise, the ancients were thoroughly ac¬ quainted, and we shall see that they made the proper application of them.