A letter, addressed to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, M.P. ... on the evil policy of those measures of quarantine, and restrictive police, which are employed for arresting the progress of the Asiatic cholera ... / by Joseph Ayre.

Date:
1837
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter, addressed to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, M.P. ... on the evil policy of those measures of quarantine, and restrictive police, which are employed for arresting the progress of the Asiatic cholera ... / by Joseph Ayre. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    whether it is essentially, or only accidentally, produced from materials supplied by rivers or their banks. Through the whole of this country, if I mistake not, it was limited in its range to places so situated; though it is quite conceivable that there may be localities apart from the side of rivers, and yet analogous to them, which may be capable, like them, of generating the malaria of this disease. The main fact upon which it is important to insist, and which, in closing this branch of the subject I may here repeat, is, that the Asiatic Cholera is distinguished from diseases of infection in not being propagated continuously, or by personal intercourse; but that it owes its production in every case to malaria,—that this malaria, like that generated in marshes, and giving rise to intermittents and remittents, is of a specific nature, and is produced from materials supplied from rivers or their banks, or by loca- lities analogous to them, and possessing certain properties in common with them. —But besides the limitation of the range of the Malignant Cholera to certain localities, as depending for its existence upon a malaria that is alone generated there, and by which it differs from infectious diseases, it is found, that in the very towns where the disease is seated, it com- mences, and chiefly prevails, in particular quar- ters of those towns, especially selecting the streets where the drainage is most defective, and which are situated nearest the rivers. In