Dr. Sutherland attested the fact that cholera was unusually prevalent in the immediate neighborhood of London graveyards. This, however, need not astonish us, when we consider that the soil of churchyards in some of the poorer districts in London was raised two, three, or even four feet in a few years. The great prevalence of epidemic diseases in some parts of the city finally led to the formation of the Epidemiological Society of London, under the presidency of Dr. Babington.
When the cholera visited London in 1854, Mr. Simon asserted that if the soil of the cemeteries in which the plague-stricken of 1665 were buried would be upturned, it would make the prevailing scourge more virulent. It was done in spite of his warning, and his prediction was verified.
In 1826, when cholera made its appearance in Egypt, the French government sent out medical officers to discover, if possible, its origin. It was traced to an old and disused cemetery at Kelioub, a village near Cairo.
The outbreak of cholera at Modena, Italy, in 1828, was shown by Professor Bianchi to be due to the upturning of the ground of burial-yards in which victims of the plague had been inhumed 300 years before.
Nov. 12, 1836, Miaulis, the adjutant of Otto the First, of Greece, was attacked by cholera, of which he finally died. The body was given in charge of three men, who also assisted at the post-mortem examination. On the third day after the funeral of the adjutant, one of the men, Jacob Kuehnlein, 72 years of age, was taken ill, and died the following day. The autopsy proved the disease to be Asiatic cholera. Three days after Kuehnlein’s burial, the second of the men who had guarded Miaulis’ remains, J. Stroehlein by name, aged 48, was stricken down by the cholera, to which he succumbed within two days.
Schauenburg (Cholera, etc., Wuerzburg, 1874, p. 8) gives it as his opinion that decomposition is favorable to the development of cholera germs, which means the propagation of the comma bacillus.
The Italians do not only stand at the head of the cremation movement to-day, but they recognized the value of that sure and never-failing germicide—fire—as early as 1837; in that year thousands of the victims of the cholera epidemic, then raging in Italy, were burned on the seashore at Palermo.
The report of the London Board of Health for 1849 directs attention to the fact that the cholera was especially prevalent and fatal in the neighborhood of graveyards. This, however, need not cause any surprise, as the London Athenæum, to this day one of the most reliable journals of the United Kingdom, states in 1850 that, during the prevalence of the scourge, 500 bodies, dead of cholera, were daily interred, in addition to those of other diseases.
Professor Jaccoud, of the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, claims, in his “Pathologie Interne,” that there are three ways of transmission of cholera, of which the third is by corpses.
An employee of the French marine hospital at Therapia, near Constantinople, was present at the autopsy of Marshal Saint Armand, who had died of cholera, which was held in the amphitheatre of the institution. A few days after the man succumbed to a severe attack of de choléra foudroyant, which he had contracted at the post-mortem examination.