LETTER III.
TO THE MEDICAL SOCIETY OF WINDSOR.
In this paper it is my intention to treat of the contagious diseases of the British Isles, as well as to offer to the Society some observations on malignant Cholera Morbus, and the mode of its propagation from the tropical regions, where it first arose, to the colder latitudes of Europe.
Having already published two letters on this last part of my subject, I need not here take up your time in recapitulating their contents, but proceed to the consideration of some remaining points of the enquiry; which I find I have either overlooked, or not been so explicit in illustration, as I otherwise might, had I been addressing a body of professional men, instead of the community where I live, with the view of disabusing their minds from the effects of irrational panic, and opening their eyes to what I deemed true measures of preservation against the impending disease; and here I may as well add that when I wrote in a newspaper and adopted the style suited to such a channel of communication, I knew none so likely to attract the attention of those influential men, who might possess the power and the will, when disabused of prejudice, to enforce proper laws, instead of running the course that had already been imposed upon them, by men interested in the upholding of our quarantine establishments, or by prejudiced, however well meaning, Boards of Health.
In looking over those letters, I find that the points most open to dispute are the course of the disease throughout the Indian peninsula, and its progress to the frontiers of Russia; as well as its supposed infectious nature, and mode of propagation by human intercourse. In regard to the first, there is no contagionist however avowed and uncompromising, who does not admit that this erratic disease did not often wander from its straight line when the most promising fields lay directly before it; or stop short most
[Pt_2
[Pg 28] unaccountably in its progress, when the richest harvest of victims seemed actually within its jaws—that its course was circuitous when, according to the laws of contagion, it ought to have been straight,—that it refused its prey at one time, and returned to it at another, in a manner that showed its progress was governed by laws which we could neither understand nor controul; and if we search the reports of contagionist writers, we shall find fully as much, and as strong evidence of its progress being independent of human intercourse, as of its being propagated and governed by the laws of contagion.[28]
[28] Vide Orton, Kennedy, &c.
To the question, which has so often been triumphantly asked, of its progress to the Russian frontiers being conducted by caravans along the great highways of human intercourse, and what else than contagion could cause it to be so carried? An admirable journalist has already replied by asking in his turn, on what other line than amongst the haunts of men could we possibly have found, or detected a human disease? And surely the question is most pertinent, for in those barbarous regions that interpose between Russia and India, where the wolf and the robber hold divided alternate sway, and isolated man dares not fix his habitation, but must congregate for safety; where else than in those great thoroughfares could the disease have found its food; or if beyond these, man, almost as ignorant and as savage as the wolf, could have been found; who under such circumstances would have recognised, described, and testified to its existence? Even at Sunderland, amongst ourselves, its existence was long hotly disputed by the learned of the faculty; and the fatalist barbarian of these regions would have dismissed the enquiry with a prayer of resignation, while he bowed his head to the grave, or if his strength permitted, with a stroke of his dagger against the impious enquirer who had dared to interfere with the immutable decrees of fate. The stories too of its importation into Russia, are exactly the same as have come to us from our own Gibraltar, in the case of
[Pt_2
[Pg 29] the yellow fever, and may be expected to come from every other quarter where a well paid officious quarantine is established to find infection in its own defence, and to trace its course in proof of their own services and utility. Under such circumstances, this well gotten up drama of importation may be rehearsed in every epidemic, adapted in all its parts to every place and every disease, they wish to make contagious. First will be presented, as at Gibraltar, the actual importers—their course traced—the disease identified—its reception denounced, and quarantine established; and this will go down until sober minded disinterested men become engaged in the enquiry, when it will turn out in all probability, that the importers, as at Sunderland, never had the disease—that it was in the place long before their arrival—that in its supposed course, it either had no existence, or had long ceased—in fact that the importation was a fable, the product either of design or an alarmed imagination. On this point I shall not here farther dwell, but proceed to the still keenly disputed question of its contagious, or non-contagious nature.
Amongst all those who have advocated the affirmative side of the question, an anonymous writer in the Lancet, of Nov. 19th. seems to me the ablest special pleader of his party, and the best informed on the subject, which he has grappled with a degree of acumen and power that must at once have secured him the victory, in any cause that had truth for its basis, or that could have stood by itself; but strong and scornful as he is, he has himself furnished the weapons for his own defeat, and has only to be correctly quoted in his own words, for answer to the most imposing and powerful of his arguments. I take it for granted, that no one will give credit to instantaneous infection, at first sight, but allow that an interval must elapse between the reception of the virus, and explosion of the disease. Kennedy and the best of the contagionist authors, have fixed the intervening time from two days to a longer uncertain period; yet that writer (in the Lancet) proceeds to tell us, in proof of the virulence of the contagion, that when twenty healthy reapers
[Pt_2
[Pg 30] went into the harvest field at Swedia, near Tripoli, and one of them at mid-day was struck down with the disease, he then instantly, as if, instead of being prostrate on the ground, he had run a muck for the propagation of Cholera Morbus, infected all the rest, so that the whole were down within three hours, and all were dead before the following morning.[29]—All this too in the open air. Another writer of note relates that when a healthy ship on the outward voyage arrived in Madras Roads, her people were seized with Cholera Morbus that very morning; but they go further than this, and command us to believe in its contagious powers, without sight at all, quoting the report from our Commissioners in Russia, where it is officially announced "that neither the presence, nor contact of the patient is necessary to communicate the disease." Surely in candour we may be allowed to say that when they limit their views to contagion alone, they have attributed powers to it, which it never did, and never can possess. That some other principle, besides their favourite one, must have been in operation, as well in the field of Swedia, when it struck down the reapers, as when it blighted our armies in the East, for these sudden bursts and explosions of pestilence are incompatible with the laws and progress of natural contagion,—that if, under a tropical temperature, which dissipates all infection, there be contagion in the disease, their must also be other powers of diffusion hitherto inscrutable, incomprehensible, and uncontroulable,—that their doctrine of contagion exclusively, is superficial narrow, and intolerant, and their arguments in support of it, no more than a delusion of prejudice, a piece of consummate special pleading to make the worse appear the better reason.[30]