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.

    30/214 page 18
    cumstances that has often been commented on as increas- ing the prevalence of cholera. The involuntary passage of the evacuations in most bad cases of cholera, must also aid in spreading the disease. Mr. Baker, of Staines, who attended two hundred and sixty cases of cholera and diarrhoea in 1849, chiefly among the poor, informed me, in a letter with which he favoured me in December of that year, that when the patients passed their stools involuntarily the disease evidently spread.” It is amongst the poor, where a whole family live,' sleep, cook, eat, and wash in a single room, that cholera has been found to spread when once introduced, and still more in those places termed common lodging- houses, in which several families were crowded into a single room. It was amongst the vagrant class, who lived in this crowded state, that cholera was most fatal in 1832; but the Act of Parliament for the regulation of common lodging-houses, has caused the disease to be much less fatal amongst these people in the late epidemics. When, on the other hand, cholera is introduced into the better kind of houses, as it often is, by means that will be afterwards pointed out, it hardly ever spreads from one member of the family to another. The constant use of the hand-basin and towel, and the fact of the apart- ments for cooking and eating being distinct from the sick room, are the cause of this. The great prevalence of cholera in institutions for pau- per children and pauper lunatics, whenever it has gained access to these buildings, meets with a satisfactory expla- nation according to the principles here laid down. In the asylum for pauper children at Tooting, one hundred and forty deaths from cholera occurred amongst a thou- sand inmates, and the disease did not cease till the re- maining children had been removed. The children were
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image