Observations on the cholera morbus of India : a letter addressed to the Honourable the Court of directors of the East-India Company / by Whitelaw Ainslie.

Date:: 1825

Credit: Observations on the cholera morbus of India : a letter addressed to the Honourable the Court of directors of the East-India Company / by Whitelaw Ainslie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

80/94 page 78

$cle Guignes, in his “ Voyages a Pekin, Manille et I’Isle de France,” (page 329), that in the year 1503 this infliction was as far east as the southern provinces of China, where it is called by the natives, Ouen-2)en. I liave said that India is exempt from the plague : it would he happy for those dominions were such also the case with regard to leprous \ affections, which are there both frequent and frightful. Epidemic fevers have occasionally, I presume, in all ages, ])roved most destructive in our eastern territories. A disease of this nature is alluded to by Orme, in his history of Hindostan, as taking place, we believe, in consequence of the great irregularity of the seasons in 17^7 (see his History, vol. ii, page 201.) ; and to a similar cause did v/e trace that which prevailed in Southern India in 1809, 1810, and 1811. But let me now recur to our more immediate object, which I do by observing, that in the medical works of the Hindoos (and these are$