Their case produces the usual effect, demands the exertion of night watching, spoken of already, as favourable to the accession of disease, and their house or apartment, close and confined as it usually is in that rank of life, becomes the abode of many unwholesome influences, and among others, of an atmosphere, deprived in a great degree of its more essential part, and loaded, too, with foreign gases, and even perhaps with chemical compounds of a virulent character, the products of putrefaction. If disease spreads much among those thus exposed, it seems fair to attribute the occurrence to these agencies known to be present, and known to be favourable to the production of sickness, and not to atmospheric contagion, as is almost universally done.
The case of disease appearing in a house previously healthy, after receiving one just recovered of disease, which it is by the way consonant with our experience to say, is much more rare than the other, or that of persons actually ill,—is occasionally noticed, and the explanation, perhaps, is, that the clothes may retain impurities acquired during the course of disease, and may on this occasion shew their activity.
CHAPTER IV.
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT ATMOSPHERIC CONTAGION TRAVELS, OR IS COMMUNICATED FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER.
The question of the communication of atmospheric contagion from one place to another has almost universally, on occasions of pestilence, been much agitated, in respect to individual diseases, but seldom in a comprehensive way, embracing all diseases. We propose to inquire generally into the facts which are held to prove the principle of dissemination from one place to another—whether contagious atmosphere is transmitted from one country to another, from one town to another, and from hamlet to hamlet.
In the many works written by medical men on occasions of great epidemic disease, descriptive of the character of the prevalent distemper, there almost universally appear the most minute accounts of the route pursued by contagion, both fomitic and atmospheric, down to the noting of the very road, the very street or alley by which it reached a town—and of the manner in which it arrived, whether on the rags of a tattered beggar, or seated in a stage-coach.
The line of its progression is taken from the observation of disease, and from that alone. Wherever disease appears, there it is said that contagion has been carried or conveyed; and as a proof of that position, it is gravely maintained, that disease invariably breaks out where there are houses, and where communication is likely to be going on in some way or other. This most extraordinary fact proves what must certainly be thought not less extraordinary, that it appears in the abodes and habitations of men. But where else is disease, we would ask, to manifest itself, if among men at all, if not where alone they are to be found?—surely not among deserts uninhabitable, or on the frosty summit of an iceberg?
It is true that in the course of an epidemic, such as the cholera, one country suffers before another; but there is no alternative to such a course if they are not to be simultaneously affected. And it signifies nothing that communication subsists between them. One part of a country, too, is ravaged first, then another, and so on—one town then another—one part of a town, and after it another part.
But it is evident, that if disease is to begin at all, it must begin somewhere, and if all parts are not to be seized on the same instant, that one will have precedence of another, and so on. Springing and propagating, from whatever causes, that character must hold, and surely it is wrong to hold a feature common to the effects of many causes as decisive evidence of the operation of one, and of one only.
The harvests of Europe begin in one country, sooner than in another. In many, harvest is earlier than in England, but it is never surmised that when that process begins in the latter country, that it is through the mediation of some such influence as contagion. It begins in England, too, it might be shewn, in places having communication with foreign countries. Nay, it might also be proven that the parts in which it in general commences are at the coast, where it is well known ships are wont to appear.
Were such an insane supposition made, the most obvious facts would necessarily be laid aside; but such gross blindness would not, we are satisfied, be much greater, than when the process of diseased action, marked out in an epidemic, is attributed to contagious atmosphere alone.