Letters upon cholera morbus, with observations upon contagion, quarantine, and disinfecting fumigations / by William Fergusson.

Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters upon cholera morbus, with observations upon contagion, quarantine, and disinfecting fumigations / by William Fergusson. 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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    2*2 domestic health police ; or why conjure up the unreal phantom of an imported plague, to delude the unhappy sufferers, as much in regard to the true nature of the disease, as to the measures best calculated for their own preservation; when it must be evident that the pestilence has sprung from amidst themselves, and that had it been an external contagion in any degree, the ordinary quarantine, as in case of the plague, would certainly have kept in off; but the question of the contagion of yellow fever, so important to commerce and humanity, and which, like the Cholera, has more than once been used to alarm the coasts of England, demands yet further investigation. For nearly 40 years hhve the medical departments of our army and navy been furnished with evidence, from beyond the Atlantic, that this disease possessed no contagious property whatever. These proofs now lie recorded by hundreds in their respective offices, and I take it upon me to say, they will not be found con- tradicted by more than one out of a hundred, amongst all the reports from the West Indies, which is as much the birth-place of the yellow fever, as Egypt is of the plague : yet, in the face of such a mass of evidence, as great or greater probably than ever was accumulated upon any medical question, has our Government been deluded, to vex commerce with unnecessary- restraints, to inflict needless cruelties upon commercial commu- nities, (for what cruelty can be greater than after destroying their means of subsistence by quarantine laws, to pen them up in a den of pestilence, there t6 perish without escape, amidst their owh malarious poison ?) and to burden the country with the costs of expensive quarantine establishments. Surely if these departments had done their duty, or will now do it, in so far as to furnish our rulers with an abstract of that evidence, with or without their own opinions, for opinions are as dust in the balance when put in com- petition with recorded facts, it must be impossible that the delusion could be suffered to endure for another year ; or should they un- luckily fail thereby to produce conviction on Government, they can refer to the records of commerce, and of our transport depart-