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APPENDIX.

LETTERS ON THE CHOLERA MORBUS,

&c. &c. &c.

WINDSOR, FEB. 9, 1832.

Salus populi suprema lex.

In writing the following letters, which I have given in the order of their respective dates, I was actuated by the state of the public mind at the time in regard to the dreaded disease of which they principally treat. The two first were addressed to the Editor of the Windsor Express, and the third to a Medical Society here, of which I am a member. The contemplation of the subject has beguiled many hours of sickness and bodily pain, and I now commit the result to the press in a more connected form, from the same motives, I believe, that influence other writers-zeal in the cause of truth, whatever that may turn out to be, and predilection for what has flowed from my own pen, not however without the desire and belief, that what I have thus written may prove useful in the discussion of a question which has in no small degree agitated our three kingdoms, and most deeply interested every civilized nation on the face of the earth.

No one, unless he can take it upon him to define the true nature of this new malignant cholera morbus, can be warranted utterly to deny the existence of contagion, but he may at the least be permitted to say, that if contagion do exist at all, it must be the weakest in its powers of diffusion, and the safest to approach, of any that has ever yet been known amongst diseases. Amateur physicians from the Continent, and from every part of the United

Kingdoms, eager and keen for cholera, and more numerous than the patients themselves, beset and surrounded the sick in Sunderland with all the fearless self-exposing zeal of the missionary character; yet no one could contrive, even in the foulest dens of that sea-port, to produce the disease in his own person, or to carry it in his saturated clothing to the healthier quarters of the town where he himself had his lodging. Surely if the disease had been typhus fever, or any other capable of contaminating the atmosphere of a sick apartment, or giving out infection more directly from the body of a patient, the result must have been different; its course, notwithstanding, has been most unaccountably and peculiarly its own slow and sure for the most part, the infected wave has rolled on from its tropical origin in the far distant east, to the borders of the arctic circle in the west-not unfrequently in the face of the strongest winds, as if the blighting action of those atmospherical currents had prepared the surface of the earth, as well as the human body, for the reception and deposition of the poison; but so far from always following the stream and line of population, as has been attempted to be shown, it has often run directly counter to both, seldom or never desolating the large cities of Europe, like the plague and other true contagions, but rather wasting its fury upon encampments of troops, as in the east, or the villages and hamlets of thickly-peopled rural districts.

That it could have been descried on no other than the above line must be self-evident, but to say that it has followed it in the manner that a contagious disease ought to have done, in our own country for instance, is at variance with the fact. From Sunderland and Newcastle to the south, the ways were open, the stream of population dense and continuous, the conveyances innumerable, the communications uninterrupted and constant. Towards the thinly-peopled north how different the aspect!-townships rare, the country often high, cold, and dreary, in many parts of the

* The numbers were so great (to which I should probably have added one, had my health permitted) as actually to make a gala day in Sunderland, and to call forth a public expression of regret at their departure.

line without inhabitants or the dwellings of man for many miles together, yet does the disease suddenly alight at Haddington, a hundred miles off, without having touched the towns of Berwick, Dunbar, or any of the intermediate places. It is said to have been carried there by vagrant paupers from Sunderland. Can this be true? Could any such, with the disease upon them in any shape, have encountered such a winter journey without leaving traces of it in their course ?* or, if they carried it in their clothing, the winds of the hills must have disinfected these fomites long before their arrival. No contagionist, however unscrupulous and enthusiastic, nor quarantine authority however vigilant, can pretend to say how the disease has been introduced at the different points of Sunderland, Haddington, and Kirkintulloch,—no more than he can tell why it has appeared at Doncaster, Portsmouth, and an infinity of other places, without spreading. Even now, it lingers at the gates of the great open cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, as if, like a malarious disease (which I by no means say that it is), it better found its food in the hamlet and the tent; in fact, amongst the inhabitants of ground tenements, than in paved towns and stone buildings. We must go farther, and acknowledge, that for many months past our atmosphere has been tainted with the miasm or poison of cholera morbus, as manifested by unusual cases of the disease almost every where, and that these harbingers of the pestilence only wanted such an ally as the drunken jubilee at Gateshead, or atmospherical conditions and changes of which we know nothing, to give it current and power. That the epidemic current of disease, wherever men exist and congregate together, must, in the first instance, resemble the contagious so strongly, as to make it impossible to distinguish the one from the other, must be self-evident: and it is only after the touchstone has been applied, and proof of non-communicability been obtained, as at Sunderland, that the impartial observer can be enabled to discern the difference.-Still, however, must he be puzzled with the inexplicable phenomena of this strange pesti

* The cholera in this country would appear always to travel with the pedestrain, and to eschew the stage coach even as an outside passenger.

lence; but if he feel himself at a loss for an argument against contagion, he has only to turn to one of the most recent communications from the Central Board of Health, where he will find "That the subsidiary force under Colonel Adams, which arrived in perfect health in the neighbourhood of a village of India infected with cholera, had seventy cases of the disease the night of its arrival, and twenty deaths the next day," as if the march under a tropical sun, and the encampment upon malarious ground, or beneath a poisoned atmosphere, were all to go for nothing; and that the neighbourhood of an infected village, with which it is not stated that they held communication, had in that instantaneous manner alone, produced the disease. This is surely drawing too largely upon our credulity, and practising upon our fears beyond the mark.

The anti-contagionist, in acknowledging his ignorance, leaves the question open to examination; but the contagionist has solved the problem to his own mind, and closed the field of investigation, without, however, ceasing to denounce the antagonist who would disturb a conclusion which has given him so much contentment.Let us here examine, for a moment, who in this case best befriends his fellow men. The latter, in vindication of a principle which he cannot prove, would shut the book of inquiry, sacrifice and abandon the sick (for to this it must ever come the moment pestilential contagion is proclaimed), extinguish human sympathy in panic fear, and sever every tie of domestic life,—the other would wait for proofs before he proclaimed the ban, and even then, with pestilence steaming before him, would doubt whether that pestilence could be best extinguished, or whether it would not be aggravated into tenfold virulence, by excommunicating the sick.

In my first letter I have endeavoured to unveil the mystery and fallacy of fumigations, for which our government has paid so dear,* and in place of the chemical disinfectants, so much extolled, of the applicability of which we know nothing, and which have always failed whenever they were depended upon, have recommended the

* Parliament voted a reward of £5000 to Dr. Carmichael Smith for the discovery.

simple and sure ones of heat, light, water, and air—with one exception, the elements of our forefathers, which, combined always with all possible purity of atmosphere, person, and habitation, have been found as sure and certain in effect as they are practical and easy of application.

Of our quarantine laws I have spoken freely, because I believe their present application, in many instances, to be unnecessary, cruel, and mischievous. Too long haye they been regarded as an engine of State, connected with vested interests and official patronage, against which it was unsafe to murmur, however pernicious they might be to commerce, or discreditable to a country laying clain to medical knowledge. The regulation for preventing the importation of tropical yellow fever (which is altogether a malarious disease of the highest temperature of heat and unwholesome locality), into England or even into Gibraltar, stands eminent for absurdity. It has long been denounced by abler pens than mine, and I know not how it can be farther exposed, unless we could induce the inhabitants of our West India Colonies to enforce the lex talionis, and institute quarantines, which they might do with the same or better reason, against the importation of pleurisies and catarrhs from the colder regions of Europe. A practical joke of this kind has been known to succeed, after reason, argument, and evidence, amounting to the most palpable demonstration, had proved of no avail.

While I have thus impugned the authority of boards and missions, and establishments, I trust it never can be imputed to me that I could have intended any the smallest personal allusion to the eminent and estimable men of whom they are composed,-all such I utterly disclaim; and to the individual, in particular, who presided over our mission to Russia, who has been my colleague in the public service, and whose friendship I have enjoyed from early youth, during a period of more than forty years, I would here, were it the proper place, pay the tribute of respect which the usefulness of his life, and excellence of his character, deserves.