Discovery of the cause, nature, cure and prevention of epidemic cholera / by M.L. Knapp.

  • Knapp, M. L. (Moses L.), 1799-1879.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Discovery of the cause, nature, cure and prevention of epidemic cholera / by M.L. Knapp. 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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    probably all combined. The scurvy was noticed again by the writer at the bedside in 1850, and it broke out in the Commercial Hospital of this city in July of that year, while the Cholera was raging here. (Western Lancet, 1851.) The Cholera manifested some activity again in the summer of 1852, after another very severe winter, and a previous summer of great heat and drought, in various localities in the United States. The summer of 1852, however, was a cool one, in the main, and the exciting causes of Cholera, therefore, not powerful. Its ravages at Maysville, Ky., Wheeling Ya., and sundry other points in the Mississippi Yalley, are matters of history, and can only be accounted for on rational principles, by tracing the cause to the con- stitution of the previous summer, abridging production in the localities surrounding the cities and towns where it raged, and the inclemency of the winter, frosting the vegetables and fruits in store. Finding that the conclusions drawn are all the way thus far supported by facts, the coincidences of cold winters, and the causes that produce scurvy, and that du- ring other years there have been no epidemic manifesta- tions of Cholera, the argument seems a good one and worth pursuing. Applying the same theory, the want of succulent vege- table food, to the rather general prevalence of Cholera in the cities of the United States this season, 1854, a rather intense causation is found, of general application, in the extrava- gantly high prices of provisions during the present year, high prices not only betokening scarcity, but being the same in effect to the poor. I notice the fact in the public prints, that scurvy and Cholera were both found raging simulta- neously in the Poor-house at Buffalo this summer. Thus the coincidences of cold winters and retarded springs, preceding the outbreaks of Cholera in the United States, its vernal appearance, solstitial ragings, autumnal recessions and wintry slumbers, together with its uniform and close communion with scurvy, prove that it is produced and gov- erned by the laws that produce and govern scurvy. Doutless, if the statistics were at hand, that the meteoric phenomena and constitution of the seasons could be appealed to through-