On the mode of communication of cholera / by John Snow.

  • John Snow
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the mode of communication of cholera / by John Snow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/214 page 15
    the healthy, and which has the property of increasing and multiplying in the systems of the persons it attacks. In syphilis, small-pox, and vaccinia, we have physical proof of the increase of the morbid material, and in other com- municable diseases the evidence of this increase, derived from the fact of their extension, is equally conclusive. As cholera commences with an affection of the alimentary canal, and as we have seen that the blood is not under the induence of any poison in the early stages of this disease,* it follows that the morbid material producing cholera must be introduced into the alimentary canal—must, in fact, be swallowed accidentally, for persons would not take it in- tentionally ; and the increase of the morbid material, or cholera poison, must take place in the interior of the sto- mach and bowels. It would seem that the cholera poison, when reproduced in sufficient quantity, acts as an irritant on the surface of the stomach and intestines, or, what is still more probable, it withdraws fluid from the blood cir- culating in the capillaries, by a power analogous to that by which the epithelial cells of the various organs abstraet the different secretions in the healthy body. For the morbid matter of cholera having the property of repro- ducing its own kind, must necessarily have some sort of structure, most likely that of a cell. It is no objection to this view that the structure of the cholera poison cannot be recognised by the microscope, for the matter of small- pox and of chancre can only be recognised by their effects, and not by their physical properties. The period which intervenes between the time when a morbid poison enters the system, and the commencement of the illness which follows, is called the period of incuba- tion. It is, in reality, a period of reproduction, as regards * In the so-called secondary fever there is toxicohsemia, arising from suppressed excretion by the kidneys.
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