Little need be said respecting the pure assumptions of Sir Gilbert as to the movements of the malady by land and by water, for those vague and hacknied statements have been again and again refuted; but we may remark that whereas all former accounts respecting the cholera in 1817, in the army of the Marquis of Hastings, state that the disease broke out somewhat suddenly in the camp on the banks of the Sinde, Sir Gilbert, without deigning to give his authority, makes the army set out for "Upper India accompanied by this epidemic." We find that Mr. Kennedy, another advocate for contagion in cholera, differs from Sir Gilbert as to the disease having accompanied the grand army on the march; for he says the appearance of the malady was announced in camp in the early part of November, when "the first cases excited little alarm." In referring, in a former letter, to the sickness in the above army, I showed from the text of the Bengal report, how a change of position produced a return of health in the troops; but Mr. Kennedy states that the disease had greatly declined a few days before the removal, so that it had lost "its infecting power." Nevertheless it appears by this gentleman's account, a little farther on, that "in their progressive movement the grounds which they occupied during the night as temporary encampments were generally found in the morning, strewed with the dead like a field of battle"! This gentleman tells us that he has laid down a law of "increase and decline appertaining to cholera," by which, and the assistance of currents of contagion,
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[Pg 40] it would appear all these things are reconciled wonderfully. Several of the points upon which he grounds his belief of contagion have been already touched upon in these letters, and the rest, considering the state of the cholera question in Europe just now, may be allowed to pass at whatever value the public may, after due examination, think it is entitled to. Let it be borne in mind that all contagionists who speak of the cholera in the army of the Marquis of Hastings, forget to tell us that though many thousand native followers had fled from that army during the epidemic, the disease did not appear in the towns situated in the surrounding country, till the following year, as may be seen at a glance by reference to Mr. Kennedy's and other maps.
We have another contagionist in the field—a writer in the Foreign Quarterly Review, the value of whose observations may appear from his statement, that "in 1828 the disease broke out in Orenburg, and was supposed [supposed!] to have been introduced by the caravans which arrive there from Upper Asia, or [or, nothing like a second string] by the Kingiss-Cossacks, who are adjoining this town, and were said [were said!] to have been about this time affected with the disease." This single extract furnishes an excellent specimen of the sort of proofs which the contagionists, to a man, seem to be satisfied with as to the cholera being "carried" from place to place. This gentleman must surely be under some very erroneous impression, when he states that, "According to the reports of the Medical Board of Ceylon, the disease made its appearance in 1819 at Jaffnah in Ceylon, imported from Palamcottah, with which Jaffnah holds constant intercourse, and thence it was propagated over the island." Now there is every reason to believe that a reference to the documents from Ceylon will shew that no report as to the importation of the disease was ever drawn up, for Drs. Farrel and Davy, as well as Messrs. Marshall, Nicholson, and others, who served in that island, are, to this hour, clearly against contagion. But as the writer tells us that he is furnished with unpublished documents respecting the cholera at St. Petersburg, by the chief of the medical department of the quarantine in this country, we do not think it necessary to say one word more—ex pede Herculem.
I rejoice to observe that Dr. James Johnson has, at last, spoken out upon the quarantine question; and I trust that others will now follow his example. It is only to be regretted, that a gentleman possessing such influence with the public as Dr. Johnson does, should have so long with-held his powerful aid on the occasion; but his motives were, I am quite sure, most conscientious; and I believe that he, as well as others, might have been prevented by a feeling of delicacy from going beyond a certain point.
Since my last letter a code of regulations, in the anticipation of cholera, has been published by the Board of Health. Let our prayers be offered up with fervency tenfold greater than before, that our land may not be afflicted with this dire malady. The following statement, however, may not be altogether useless at this moment. According to the Journal des Debats of the 24th instant, the Emperor of Austria, in a letter to his High Chancellor, dated Schœnbrunn, October 10th, and published in the
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[Pg 41] Austrian Observer of the 12th, formally makes the most magnanimous declaration to his people, that he had committed an error in adopting the vexatious and worse-than useless quarantine and cordon regulations against cholera; that he did so before the nature of the disease was so fully understood; admits that those regulations have been found, after full experience, to have produced consequences more calamitous than those arising from the disease itself ("plus funeste encore que les maux que provenaient de la maladie elle-même.") He kindly makes excuses for still maintaining a modified quarantine system at certain points, in consequence, as he states, of the opinions still existing in the dominions of some of his neighbours, for otherwise his commercial relations would be broken off. To secure his maritime intercourse, he must do as they do! We find that as all the Prussian cordons have been dissolved, their vessels are excluded from entrance into certain places on the Elbe. What a horrid state of things! But, as a reference will shew, this was one of the things stated in my first letter as likely to occur: it is surely a fit subject for immediate arrangement between governments. In the mean time, we cannot but profit by the great lesson just received from Austria.
I shall add no more on the present occasion, than that my last information from Edinburgh notifies the death, from Scotch cholera, of two respectable females in that city, after an illness of only a few hours.
LETTER VI.
At a moment when the subject of cholera has become so deeply interesting, the good of the public can surely not be better consulted by the press than when it devotes its columns (even to the exclusion of some political and other questions of importance) to details of plain facts connected with the contagious or non-contagious nature of that malady—a question beyond all others regarding it, of most importance, for upon it must hinge all sanatory or conservative regulations, and a mistake must, in the event of an epidemic breaking out, directly involve thousands in ruin. In the case of felony, where but the life of a single individual is at stake—nay, not only in the case of felony, but in the case of a simple misdemeanour, or even in the simple case of debt—we see the questions of yes or no examined by the Judges of the land with due rigour; while, on the point to which I refer, and which affects so deeply the dearest interests of whole communities, evidence has been acted upon so vague as to make some people fancy that we have retrograded to the age of witchcraft. Be it recollected that we shall not have the same excuse as some of our continental neighbours had for running into frightful errors—for we have their dear-bought experience laid broadly before us; and to profit duly by it, it only requires a scrutiny by a tribunal, wholly, if you please, non-medical, such as may be formed within an hour