Report of the Committee for Scientific Inquiries in relation to the cholera-epidemic of 1854.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health. Medical Council.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Committee for Scientific Inquiries in relation to the cholera-epidemic of 1854. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    attained its utmost extension, and was now in process of decline. If, however, we cannot speak with unmixed satisfaction of the materials which are before us, we can at least point to their nature and extent as in the highest degree encou- raging to future exertions, more extended, more systematic, ] and more continuous. Our principal aims, and the methods by which their attainment was sought, have been as follows:— I. with a view to the descriptive history of cholera, we have examined the larger statistics of this invasion; as to the places wherein the disease chiefly prevailed; as to the influence of age, sex, and employment in favouring its attack; and as to its own pathological stages and periods ;— II. in the hope to gain more precise knowledge of the causes of the disease, we thought it of primary import- ance that the aii' and water of the inetropolis during the epidemic period should be studiously observed, and that special inquiries should, as far as possible, be made into the state of these universal influences in districts actually infected Avith cholera;—and III. with the object of increasing for our profession the present insufficient resources of medical treatment, we have endeavoured to procure comparative records of various therapeutical experience, successful or unsuc- cessful, and have invited from persons versed in such inquiry an elucidation of those questions in the practical pathology of cholera which appeared to us most urgent for solution. First Section. Statistics. Of statistical material, the following has been before us : 1. We have derived from the General Register Office a list of all deaths registered during the epidemic period as caused by cholera or diarrhoea, with particulars as to the Stor(