THE NAME OF THE DISEASE.
Although the term cholera, when applied to the disease under notice, is derivatively erroneous, it has been so long adopted, and universally employed, that it would be vain, perhaps useless, to attempt to alter it; but the adjective appellatives coupled with it are so numerous and inappropriate, so confusing, and so likely to lead to unjust conclusions, that it is desirable to substitute for them a single significant epithet.
Asiatic cholera is the most common designation, and appears to be the most incorrect, inasmuch as it assumes that the disease is an import from Asia, while there is strong reason to conclude that it has no more claim to be called Asiatic than American. There is reason to conclude that the cholera now widely diffused over the United Kingdom, is not an imported product of any foreign country, near or remote, but is as much the product of the places and the circumstances of the subjects where it exists, as is ague, or bronchocele.
Spasm is not peculiar nor essential to it; for severe spasms often accompany bilious cholera; and in the worst forms of this disease cramps are not violent nor continued. Spasmodic cholera, consequently, is not a proper designation.
The terms “malignant,” “pestilential,” &c., which have been joined with it, convey no idea but that of destructive force, and are destitute of discriminative meaning.
With a view to getting rid of these, and such erroneous or unmeaning terms, it is proposed to couple with the substantive cholera the adjective abiliosa, the prefixed privative being intended to denote the suppression of the biliary secretion, so constant and important an element in the diseased actions constituting cholera. It is true that other secretions essential to health, as that of urine, are suspended, or materially lessened; but the total want of bile in the fluid discharged from the stomach and bowels, is one of the most striking and unequivocal characteristics of the disease; and the term suggested would serve to separate it from the form of cholera in which the biliary secretion is excessively augmented, and with which it is perhaps sometimes confounded. It would, at any rate, have the merit of giving one distinctive idea, and leading to no false conclusion. There would then be two intelligible names for the two forms of the disease, namely, cholera abiliosa and cholera biliosa.
CAUSE OF THE DISEASE.
It is not intended in this place to discuss at length the question of the contagious power, or personal communicability of cholera, but in support of the opinion given above, that it is a domestic, not a foreign malady, with which we have to deal, a few incontrovertible facts will be cited.
The disease broke out at the same time in Gosport, and in Portsea Portsmouth and Southsea, situated on opposite sides of the harbour, and affected numbers in different parts of those towns at once.
At the same time—almost to an hour in some of the places—it appeared in Southampton, Salisbury, Bristol, and Plymouth. Such simultaneous eruptions of disease, in different distant places, appear incompatible with the hypothesis of contagion—irreconcileable with the belief that it arises from, and is communicated by one body to another, either directly or indirectly, either by recent emanations from a diseased body acting speedily on proximate healthy bodies, or by the same emanations, in a concrete form—called formites—acting on distant healthy bodies, after uncertain lapses of time.