Papers relative to the disease called cholera spasmodica in India, now prevailing in the north of Europe : with extracts of letters, reports, and communications received from the continent.
- Privy Council of the United Kingdom
- Date:
- 1831
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Papers relative to the disease called cholera spasmodica in India, now prevailing in the north of Europe : with extracts of letters, reports, and communications received from the continent. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![then the patient is to be put into a warm bed, well covered, and surrounded with warm jugs or bags of ashes, continuing all the while to drink tea. 6. Immediately after put on the pit of the stomach, particularly if the vomiting be violent, a warm bag of mustard, filled with four table spoonfuls of mustard-seed, and one or two table spoonfuls of rye meal, which is made into a dough with water, and spread to the thickness of a thumb, on a piece of linen of the size of a plate. If the pains of the stomach and the vomiting be vehe- ment, then place the mustard bag there in the very beginning. 7. As the perspiration must be kept up at least for twelve hours, the clothes penetrated by it must be exchanged for others which are dry, care being taken lest the patient should catch cold. Extract of a Letter from Alexandria. July 21, 1831. I have to perform the painful duty of acquainting you, that the cholera morbus broke out in the Hejaz in the middle of April last, and that it continued to rage in that province up to the 24th May,—the date of the last official report received from Mecca, where it had, up to that time, carried off, in the space of twenty to thirty days, 5500, including such pilgrims as died with the disease within the town, but exclusive of an immense nuniber who perished in the neighbouring villages, and particularly on Mount Arafat, on the very day of their ' feast of the sacrifice,' called by them the Corbam BaHram, the 22d May. The number of pilgrims is stated to have been 50,000, of which 20,000 are said to have fallen victims to the cholera morbus. The remainder set out on the day following the Bairam, on return to their respective homes, in two columns, the principal of which is composed of the Persian, Mesopotamian, Armenian, and Syrian pilgrims, who cross a perfect desert, and reach Damascus in two months. The other, composed of Africans, those of Constantinople, Asia-Minor, Caramania, and Egypt, to the number of 4000, arrived on the ] 3th instant at Cairo, having therefore performed the journey in fifty-one days. Cordons sanitaires had been previously established at Suez and Cosseir, and other places; but little can be expected from these measures for stopping the progress of a distemper which has hitherto baffled all human opposition, and consequently the arrival of the pilgrims in the suburbs of Cairo has caused the greatest consternation ; but hitherto no well authenticated case of cholera has, to my knowledge, occurred in that city, or any town or village in Egypt. If this dreadful disease be similar in its progress to its march](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21297770_0072.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
