On the early seats of cholera in India, and in the East, with reference to the past and present / by John Macpherson, M.D.
- John Macpherson
- Date:
- 1869
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the early seats of cholera in India, and in the East, with reference to the past and present / by John Macpherson, M.D. 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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![purging were always recognised as the two prominent symp- toms, just as brechruhr is the common name for it in Ger- many. Some of the synonyms of cholera will be found in a note at the end. III. I think that several conclusions may be fairly drawn from the foregoing history of the disease and of its names, and the first of them is— 1. That cholera of various degrees of intensity has always prevailed in India, as it does at the present day. If we refer to old Hindoo medicine, we find that under the head of Ajerna were described four kinds of cholera, the worst form of which was the mdhuna visuchi. [Dr. Hall, of the India Office, assures me that this, like other phrases for cholera, merely means in Sanscrit a disturbance of the stomach and intestines.] This division seems to have passed over to the Portuguese, for, curiously enough, we have De Thevenot saying there were four degrees of mordeshi. Different writers make different distinctions among choleraic attacks, but the following are the common forms met with in India, and I may remark that I have had occasion to treat the disease in each of twenty-four consecutive years. You have ordinary bilious attacks of vomiting and purging. You have much more violent choleraic attacks, sometimes fatal ones, often connected with some article of food that has acted as a poison. The earliest Portuguese writers mention such attacks after eating prawns, and I have seen various such cases myself. You havetrue choleraendemicindistricts,occur- ring sporadically, and generally showing a tendency at parti- cular seasons to become epidemic; and you have the same disease raging with epidemic violence. The symptoms of all these forms of disease run into each other. In their com- mencement there is no absolute line of demarcation between them, any more than between European and Indian cholera. They only vary in the intensity of the symptoms and thef amount of prevalence. Of course no one can mistake a well marked case of the bad form when it is fully developed, but not every one can say where the mild form ends and the bad commences ; nor at the outset of a case can you always pre- dicate absolutely, although you generally can, which it is to turn out. These appear to me to be simple facts, whatever conclusions may be drawn from them. I speak of symp- toms only. I do not enter into the question of the specific character of malignant cholera. But a division of cholera of the violent form into two kinds is brought prominently before us by the history of the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2148160x_0021.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
