288 Professor J. Bur don Sanderson [May 15, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, May 15, 1885. 



Sir Frederick Abel, C.B. D.C.L. F.R.S. Manager, in the Chair. 



Professor J. Burdon Sanderson, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S. 



Cholera : its Cause and Prevention. 



The interest excited in cholera by its presence in Europe during 

 last summer and autumn was reawakened in the spring by the 

 prospect of a war which might have brought us face to face with an 

 enemy much more formidable than the armies of Russia. War is no 

 longer in immediate prospect, so that for the present we need not 

 think of cholera in connection with Asia Minor or the Black Sea. 

 But the epidemic which is now raging with such pitiless fury in the 

 Mediterranean provinces of Spain makes us all feel that the threat 

 of 1884 may be fulfilled in 1885. There is probably no serious 

 ground for apprehending that we shall have to do with cholera in 

 England this year ; the chance, however, is sufficiently near to make 

 it reasonable to inquire whether any useful information as to the 

 causes of cholera, or the way in which it can best be guarded against, 

 has been gained since the last time that the disease visited our 

 shores. 



In dealing with cholera, as in other matters in respect of which 

 conduct must be guided by knowledge of some kind, the question 

 what sort of knowledge is best and most valuable comes prominently 

 to the front, and is one on which those who profess to follow the 

 scientific method, and those who profess to be guided by what they 

 are pleased to call common sense, are apt to entertain difi'erent 

 opinions. The question is in reality not between two kinds of 

 knowledge, but between tw^o ways of acquiring the same kind of 

 knowledge. Those of us who have studied cholera at home in the 

 hospital ward or in the laboratory approach the subject on one side. 

 Those whose lives, like that of my friend Dr. J. M. Cunningham, the 

 Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, have for the 

 most part been spent in a prolonged encounter with cholera year after 

 year, as it presents itself in prisons and armies and among the multi- 

 tudinous populations of our Indian Empire, from another. But we 

 are all seeking the same kind of knowledge, and what is more, we 

 all tend to the same conclusions. If, for example, a comparison be 

 made of the recent work published by Dr. Cunningham, "Cholera: 

 What can the State do to prevent it ? " in which he professes to con- 

 fine himself to considerations of common sense and deprecates the 

 interference of science with practical questions, w^th the lecture 



