The cholera not to be arrested by quarantine: a brief historical sketch of the great epidemic of 1817, and its invasions of Europe in 1831-2 and 1847: with practical remarks on the treatment, preventive and curative, of the disease / [Gavin Milroy].

  • Gavin Milroy
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cholera not to be arrested by quarantine: a brief historical sketch of the great epidemic of 1817, and its invasions of Europe in 1831-2 and 1847: with practical remarks on the treatment, preventive and curative, of the disease / [Gavin Milroy]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mode of diffusion of a disease truly infectious presents to that of the pestilence now under consideration. Take, for example. Typhus fever, of whose wide-spread prevalence there have been such melancholy proofs in this country, and in our American colonies, during the course of the present year. No one can for an instant doubt but that the dissemination of this too-certain offspring of famine and wretchedness has been mainly owing to the vast numbers of Irish poor who have scattered themselves in all directions, carrying the seeds of their self-engendered dis¬ ease wherever they went. So surely has this been the case, that the track of their dispersion over the length and breadth of the land might be as readily followed by the outbreak of the fever, as the path of the early sower by the line of springing corn along the furrowed field in summer. Wherever a poor Irish family located itself, there inevitably did the disease—provided always there existed in the place a similar condition of insalu¬ brity to that amid which it first arose—make its appearance; nor can it be necessary to do more than merely allude to the still more melancholy and disastrous results that occurred on board the ships, in which the infected emigrants were carried to the shores of the New World. That, in these instances, the fever was transmitted from person to person, and conveyed from country to country, it requires no argument of mine to prove. Not, in¬ deed, but that it is endemic and indigenous—although in a much less degree—in this country as well as in Ireland ; for it is well known that it will as certainly spring up in some form or another wherever human beings are congregated together in wretchedness, want, and impurity, as noxious weeds will appear in a neglected soil. But that the leavening virus was, in the majority of instances, directly introduced in the manner I have mentioned, has, alas ! been too obvious to admit of any doubt. The malig¬ nancy and extent of the disease have been uniformly proportion¬ ate to the number and sickliness of the emigrants that were received, coupled with the insalubrity of the place where they took up their abode; and need I add, in confirmation of the same fact, that it only required the disinfecting powers of clean¬ liness, of a sufficient supply of wholesome food, and free ventila¬ tion to be brought into requisition to put a stop to an evil, which D
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