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.

    28/214 page 16
    the morbid matter; and the disease is due to the crop or progeny resulting from the small quantity of poison first introduced. In cholera, this period of incubation or repro- duction is much shorter than in most other epidemic or communicable diseases. From the cases previously de- tailed, it is shown to be in general only from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. It is owing to this shortness of the period of incubation, and to the quantity of the morbid poison thrown off in the evacuations, that cholera some- times spreads with a rapidity unknown in other diseases. The mode of communication of cholera might have been the same as it is, even if it had been a disease of the blood; for there is a good deal of evidence to show that plague, typhoid fever, and yellow fever, diseases in which the blood is affected, are propagated in the same way as cholera. There is sufficient evidence also, I believe, in the following pages, to prove the mode of communication of cholera here explained, independently of the pathology of the disease ; but it was from considerations of its patho- logy that the mode of communication was first explained, and, if the views here propounded are correct, we had a knowledge of cholera, before it had been twenty years in Europe, more correct than that of most of the older epi- demics ; a knowledge which, indeed, promises to throw much light on the mode of propagation of many diseases which have been present here for centuries. The instances in which minute quantities of the ejec- tions and dejections of cholera patients must be swallowed are sufficiently numerous to account for the spread of the disease; and on examination it is found to spread most where the facilities for this mode of communication are greatest. Nothing has been found to favour the extension of cholera more than want of personal cleanliness, whe- ther arising from habit or scarcity of water, although the
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image