Thoughts on the best means of lessening the destructive progress of cholera : in a letter addressed to the Right Honourable Viscount Melbourne / by Joshua Brookes.

  • Brookes, Joshua, 1761-1833.
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thoughts on the best means of lessening the destructive progress of cholera : in a letter addressed to the Right Honourable Viscount Melbourne / by Joshua Brookes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    fi£ 1. All those external circumstances known to favour the generation, dissemination, and reception of contagious diseases, are to be duly examined into, and where defective, measures are to be taken for their rectification. 66 With respect to the law first laid down, it is essential to remark, that whatever be the hypothesis embraced to account for the mode of spreading of any disease—for example, typhus fever, plague, yellow fever, cholera, &c.— it is totally independent of all controversy, that the history of these maladies furnishes abundant proof that a crowded population, poverty, filth, foul air, unwholesome food, especially bad water, depressing passions, habits of intem¬ perance, defective clothing, and general bodily debility, powerfully predispose to the reception of these diseases, increase their mortality when received, and tend to promote their extension by other means, to persons sheltered by rank and circumstances from their primary influence. An example of the operation of some of the preceding causes is well afforded by M. Brierre de Boismont’s narra¬ tive of the Warsaw' epidemic. 6 At first it seized those poor and hapless individuals who fed on indigestible ali¬ ments, who adopted no precaution against atmospheric changes, who dwelt surrounded by filth, in narrow', damp, and unwholesome places. The most numerous victims w;ere amongst the Jews, whose uncleanliness has in Poland be¬ come proverbial. There can be no doubt/ he continues, 6 but that had the filth been daily removed, the houses, barricades, and sinks, effectually cleansed, the number of deaths would have been materially diminished.5 That the association of too numerous individuals breathing; a common air not only predisposes to epidemics, but even actually generates them, is shown indisputably by the occurrence of typhus, as described by Pringle and Rouppe, on board crowded and imperfectly ventilated ships; and in Cholera, a disease shown to be so intimately connected with imper¬ fect arterialization of the blood, it is not racking probability