WHAT WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT ASIATIC CHOLERA.
NEW YORK, September 1, 1884.
To the Editor of the New York Medical Journal:
SIR: I have been exceedingly interested in Dr. Bartlett's suggestive article in your issue of August 30. But a sufficient number of well-established facts are known to account for all the peculiarities and vagaries of cholera.
1. Cholera has existed in Hindostan for centuries. It was found there by Vasco da Gama in 1496, and there is a perfectly authentic history of it from that time down to the present.
2. It is never absent from India, from whence it has been conveyed innumerable times to other countries. It has never become domiciled in any other land, not even in China, parts of which lie in the same latitude; nor in Arabia, to which country pilgrims go every year from India; nor in Egypt, nor Persia, with which communication is so frequent; much less in any other part of the world. Canton in China, Muscat and Mecca in Arabia, lie nearly in the same degree of latitude as Calcutta, in which cholera is always existent; yet these places only have cholera occasionally, and then only after arrivals of it from Hindostan.
3. The arrival of cholera in other countries is often involved in some easily removable obscurity, which is deepened only by the ignorance and want of veracity of quarantine and other officials.
4. Cholera is almost always preceded by a premonitory diarrhoea, which lasts from one or two to three or four or more days before urgent and characteristic symptoms show themselves. Of 6,213 cases, no less than 5,786 had preceding diarrhoea. The sufferers from this sow the germs of the disease in numerous, often distant and obscure, places, to which no choleraic person is supposed to have come.