1781.—"The Plague is now broke out in Bengal, and rages with great violence; it has swept away already above 4000 persons. 200 or upwards have been buried in the different Portuguese churches within a few days."—Hicky's Bengal Gazette, April 21.
These quotations show that cholera, whether as an epidemic or as sporadic disease, is no new thing in India. Almost in the beginning of the Portuguese expeditions to the East we find apparent examples of the visitations of this terrible scourge, though no precise name is given in the narratives. Thus we read in the Life of Giovanni da Emboli, an adventurous young Florentine who served with the Portuguese, that, arriving in China in 1517, the ships' crews were attacked by a pessima malatia di frusso (virulent flux) of such kind that there died thereof about 70 men, and among these Giovanni himself, and two other Florentines (Vita, in Archiv. Stor. Ital. 33). Correa says that, in 1503, 20,000 men died of a like disease in the army of the Zamorin. We have given above Correa's description of the terrible Goa pest of 1543, which was most evidently cholera. Madras accounts, according to Macpherson, first mention the disease at Arcot in 1756, and there are frequent notices of it in that neighbourhood between 1763 and 1787. The Hon. R. Lindsay speaks of it as raging at Sylhet in 1781, after carrying off a number of the inhabitants of Calcutta (Macpherson, see the quotation of 1781 above). It also raged that year at Ganjam, and out of a division of 5000 Bengal troops under Col. Pearse, who were on the march through that district, 1143 were in a few days sent into hospital, whilst "death raged in the camp with a horror not to be described." The earliest account from the pen of an English physician is by Dr. Paisley, and is dated Madras, Feby. 1774. In 1783 it broke out at Hardwār Fair, and is said, in less than 8 days, to have carried off 20,000 pilgrims. The paucity of cases of cholera among European troops in the returns up to 1817, is ascribed by Dr. Macnamara to the way in which facts were disguised by the current nomenclature of disease. It need not perhaps be denied that the outbreak of 1817 marked a great recrudescence of the disease. But it is a fact that some of the more terrible features of the epidemic, which are then spoken of as quite new, had been prominently described at Goa nearly three centuries before.
See on this subject an article by Dr. J. Macpherson in Quarterly Review, for Jany. 1867, and a Treatise on Asiatic Cholera, by C. Macnamara, 1876. To these, and especially to the former, we owe several facts and references; though we had recorded quotations relating to mordexin and its identity with cholera some years before even the earlier of these publications.
MORDEXIM, MORDIXIM, s. Also the name of a sea-fish. Bluteau says 'a fish found at the Isle of Quixembe on the Coast of Mozambique, very like bogas (?) or river-pikes.'
MOSELLAY, n.p. A site at Shīrāz often mentioned by Hāfiz as a favourite spot, and near which is his tomb.
c. 1350.—
"Boy! let yon liquid ruby flow,
And bid thy pensive heart be glad,
Whate'er the frowning zealots say;
Tell them that Eden cannot show