Letters on the Cholera Morbus.. Fergusson William
authority, and this is now, in all probability, pretty generally known to be the case, as Dr. Macmichael must be quite aware of.
To the medical gentlemen of India who have been concerned in the official reports, which do them, en masse, so much credit, Dr. Macmichael is little disposed to be complimentary; and, indeed, he seems to insinuate that those were rather stupid fellows who did not come to what he is pleased to consider "a just and right conclusion," as to contagion; he thinks, however, that he has got a few of "the most candid" to join in his belief. We shall see whether he had better reason to look towards the Ganges and Beema for a confirmation of his doctrines, than he had toward the Don or the Volga. How does the case stand with respect to one of the gentlemen whom he quotes, – Mr. Jukes, of the Bombay Establishment? This gentleman, like all who speak of cholera, mentions circumstances as to the progress of the disease which he cannot comprehend, and Dr. Macmichael shows us what those circumstances are; but Dr. Macmichael does not exhibit to us what does come perfectly within Mr. Jukes's comprehension, but which is not quite so suitable to the doctor's purpose. This omission I shall take the liberty to supply from an official letter from Mr. Jukes in the Bombay Reports: – "I have had no reason to think it has been contagious here, neither myself nor any of my assistants, who have been constantly amongst the sick, nor any of the hospital attendants, have had the disease. It has not gone through families when one has become affected. It is very unlike contagion too, in many particulars." &c. – (Bombay Reports, page 172.) – Ought we not to be a little surprised that so great an admirer of candour, as Dr. Macmichael seems to be, should, while so anxious to give every information to his readers, calculated to throw light upon the subject of cholera, omits the above important paragraph, which we find, by the way immediately precedes the one upon opinions and difficulties which he quotes from the same gentleman? But let us examine what the amount of force is, which can be obtained from that part of Mr. Jukes's paper, which it does please Dr. Macmichael to quote: – "If it be something general in the atmosphere, why has it not hitherto made its appearance in some two distinct parts of the province at the same time? Nothing of this kind has, I believe, been observed. It still seems creeping from village to village, rages for a few days, and then begins to decline." I find myself unable, at this moment, to ascertain the extent of Mr. Jukes's means of obtaining information as to what was passing in other parts of his province; but I think the following quotation, on which I am just now able to lay my hand, will not only satisfactorily meet what is here stated, but must, in the public opinion, be treasured, as it serves at once to displace most erroneous ideas long prevalent, and which, I believe, greatly influenced men's decisions as to contagion: – "It may, then, first be remarked, that the rise and progress of the disorder were attended by such circumstances as showed it to be entirely independent of contagion for its propagation. Thus we have seen that it arose at nearly one and the same time in many different places, and that in the same month, nay, in the same week, it was raging in the unconnected and far-distant districts of Behar and Dacca." (Bengal Reports, p. 125.) Again (p. 9), that in Bengal "it at once raged simultaneously in various and remote quarters, without displaying a predilection for any one tract or district more than for another; or any thing like regularity of succesion in the chain of its operations." In support of what is stated in these extracts, the fullest details are given as to dates and places; and at page 9 of those Reports, a curious fact is given, "That the large and populous city of Moorshedabad, from extent and local position apparently very favourably circumstanced for the attacks of the epidemic, should have escaped with comparatively little loss, whilst all around was so severely scourged." This seems to have been pretty similar to what is now taking place with respect to the city of Thorn, which remains free from cholera, though the communication is open with divers infected places in every direction. Should Thorn still be attacked by the disease (as it sooner or later will, in all human probability), the contagionists par métier will try to establish a case of hemp or hare-skin importation, I have no doubt. I wonder much that Dr. Macmichael or Dr. B. Hawkins, when favouring us with eastern quotations, did not give the public the opinion of Dr. Davy, who is so well known in Europe, and who saw the cholera in Ceylon; his conjecture (quite accessible, I believe, to every medical man in London) may perhaps be as valuable as that of any other person. The following is a copy of it: – "The cause of the disease is not any sensible change in the atmosphere; yet, considering the progress of the disease, its epidemic nature, the immense extent of country it has spread over, we can hardly refuse to acknowledge that its cause, though imperceptible, though yet unknown, does exist in the atmosphere. It may be extricated from the bowels of the earth, as miasmata were formerly supposed to be; it may be generated in the air, it may have the properties of radiant matter, and, like heat and light, it may be capable of passing through space unimpeded by currents; like electricity, it may be capable of moving from place to place in an imperceptible moment of time." Dr. Davy is an army physician, and the report of which this is an extract, may be seen at the Army Medical Office, a place which, of late years, has become a magazine of medical information of the most valuable kind in Europe. There is this difference between army and other information on cholera, that (whether in the King's or E. I. Company's service) the statements given by the medical gentlemen have their accuracy more or less guaranteed by a certain system of military control over the documents they draw up: thus, in the circumstance already noticed as having occurred in the 14th regiment, we have every reason to rely upon its accuracy, which we could not have in a similar statement among the population of any country; and we have, I think, no reason to believe that in pronouncing the cholera of Ceylon not contagious, Dr. Davy, as well as two other gentlemen of high character and experience (Drs. Farrel and Marshall), have not gone upon such data as may bear scrutiny.
LETTER III
Having given, in my last letter, Dr. Davy's views as to the cause of cholera, I may so far remark just now regarding them, that they are not new, or peculiar to him; and that it may be well, before Dr. Macmichael or others pronounce them vague, that they should inquire whether some of those causes have not been assigned for the production of certain epidemics, by one of the soundest heads of Dr. Macmichael's college – Dr. Prout, who seems, if we have not greatly mistaken him, to have been led to the opinion by some experiments of Herschell, detailed in the Philosophical Transactions of the year 1824. They should recollect that other competent persons devoted to researches on such subjects (Sir R. Phillips among the number) admit specific local atmospheres (not at all malaria in the usual sense of the term), produced by irregular streams of specific atoms from the interior of the earth, and "arising from the action and re-action of so heterogeneous a mass." For my part I feel no greater difficulty in understanding how our bodies, "fearfully and wonderfully made" as we are, should be influenced by those actions, re-actions, and combinations, to which Sir Richard refers, and of "whose origin and progress the life and observation of man can have no cognizance," than how they are influenced by other invisible agents, the existence of which I am compelled to admit. – If the writer of the article on cholera in the Westminster Review, for October, 1831, do not find all his objections met by these observations, I must only refer him to the quid divinum of Hippocrates: – but I must protest against logic such has been employed by certain members of our Board of Health, who lately, on the examination of gentlemen of the profession who had served in India, and who had declared the disease not to be communicable, came to the conclusion that it must, nevertheless, be so, as those gentlemen could not show what it was owing to.
Most extraordinary certainly it does appear, that while Dr. Macmichael goes to the trouble of giving us (p. 27) the views of a captain (!) as to the progress of cholera at a certain place in India, he should have refrained altogether from referring, on the point of contagion or non-contagion, to the report of such a person as Dr. Davy, or to the reports of this gentleman's colleagues at Ceylon, Drs. Farrell and Marshall. Had Dr. Macmichael added a little to his extract from Capt. Sykes, by informing us of what that gentleman states as to the great mortality ("350 in one day") in the town of Punderpoor, "when the disease first commenced its ravages there," people would have means of judging how unlike this was to a contagious disease creeping from person to person in its commencement.
It is painful to be obliged to comment on the manner in which Dr. Bisset Hawkins has handled the questions relative to the Ceylon epidemic, which seems far from being impartial; for, while he quotes (p. 172) Dr. Davy, "a medical officer well known in the scientific world," as stating that the cause