Electricity as a cause of cholera, or other epidemics, and the relation of galvanism to the action of remedies / by Sir James Murray.

  • Murray, James, Sir, 1788-1871.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Electricity as a cause of cholera, or other epidemics, and the relation of galvanism to the action of remedies / by Sir James Murray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    25/180 (page 13)
    ''^marsh miasm'''' exists, or ever did exist. There are many offensive, and even insalubrious emanations from decaying substances, but none of them are capable of inflicting the multifarious injuries attributed to that night- mare of the mist, malarial There is no occasion to evoke such noxious spirits from the vasty deep, to account for damages done, positively^ to animated beings. Instead of receiving such a deleterious agent into bodies, to originate pestilence, it appears more certain that bodies lose, or give out, some of their own qualities of sanatary influence, the deprivation of which renders them amenable to certain scales of disordered conditions—millions of trials shew, that the infliction is generally of a negative, not of a positive kind, in localities calculated to withdraw vital powers from living things. DEDUCTION III. Continued trials testify, that fens, marshes, sewers, drains, cess-pools, mud-banks, filthy garments, wet floors, damp factories, sunless rooms, and houses near grave-yards, are the carriers, but not the creatoi's, of pestilential and epidemic maladies. That these ready conductors convey away part of the natural atomical electric power which eveiy particle of living matter should enjoy; that where partial privation has already been efifected by sorrow, intemperance, hard studies, bad diet, damp clothing, or night air, then a farther abstraction of galvanic vitality readily robs the body of its healthy energy. Under such exhaustion there remains no tone, or sufficient nervous power to resist the assaults of diseases, and the system soon becomes reduced to a condi- tion suited to be assailed by the disorders prevailing in such unhealthy localities. Such abstraction of the living prin-