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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    and if in a few instances the precise origin cannot be traced, in a multitude of others it can, and the fact of its infectious nature is fully made out. II. —Another law of infectious diseases is, that they are propagated continuously, and in all directions, and in the order of the intercommunica- tion of persons and places. III. —They are limited to no particular towns. IV. —Nor to any specific localities in such towns. V. —And though they may be influenced by the state of the atmosphere for their degrees of intensity, they owe nothing to it for their origin ; and they never wholly disappear from a country. VI. —And, lastly, they attack persons indis- criminately, and of every class and condition. I may now proceed to enquire how these laws, as followed by infectious diseases, admit of being applied to the facts which we possess in regard to the origin and course of the Malignant C holera. I.—It is a fact fully established, that in a great majority of the first cases arising in different towns, the source whence they sprung was unknown, and could not even be guessed ; and frequently, instead of these first cases being followed by others in the same house, and so spreading to the immediate neighbourhood, the second or third case was found to occur in some distant quarter of the town ; and a fourth in some other district equally apart from the n