290 Professor J. Bur don Sanderson [May 15, 



and Mirzapore ; and in October of the same year an event occurred 

 wliich at once gave the disease a significance it had not before 

 possessed. The Marquis of Hastings, with an army of over 10,000 

 Europeans and a much larger native force, was in the Bundelcund, 

 not far from Aliababad, where cholera was then raging. Cholera 

 had on several previous occasions interfered with military operations, 

 but this time it attacked Hastings' European troops with a violence 

 of which there had before been no example. The pestilence con- 

 tinued for several weeks with unabated destructiveness, until early in 

 November the army was withdrawn from the Bundelcund and moved 

 westwards in its march towards Gwalior, on which the mortality at 

 once subsided. Thousands of dead and dying were left behind, but 

 cholera was left behind with them, and a lesson was learned which 

 has since been often repeated in Indian experience — that when a 

 military force is encountered by cholera, removal from the infected 

 locality is the only effectual way of checking it. 



In 1818 cholera overspread the whole Indian Peninsula. West- 

 ward it extended up the Ganges valley to Delhi and Agra, and 

 eventually found its way across the Sutlej to Lahore. Southwards 

 it flanked the line of the Yindhya, attacked Nagpore, and thence 

 spread to other places in Central India. Along the east coast there 

 were destructive epidemics at Vizagapatam, in the deltas of the 

 Godavery and Kistnah, at Madras and Pondicherry, and various other 

 places further south. In 1819 Ceylon, which had been similarly 

 invaded in 1804 and probably often previously, suffered very severely ; 

 The spread of cholera in the island was naturally enough attributed 

 to the commercial intercourse between Trincomalee and the infected 

 ports on the coast of Coromandel. Whatever may be said for or 

 a<^ainst this belief as regards Ceylon, it is difficult to offer any other 

 explanation of the outbreak which occurred the same year in 

 Mauritius than the obvious one that it w^as carried over the sea by 

 trading ships ; for even though the evidence which exists that the 

 Mauritius epidemic took its start from the arrival, with cholera on 

 board, of the ship Topaze, were proved to be defective, it could 

 scarcely be accounted for in any other way than as a result of com- 

 mercial intercourse. From Mauritius cholera spread to Madagascar 

 and the Portuguese settlements on the east coast of Africa. 



In the course of 1820 cholera seems to have spread over Asia. 

 In that year it was at Canton and Nankin, and travelled up the 

 Yang-tse-kiang into the interior of China, and finally reached the 

 capital. In the same year it is said that 150,000 persons died of it 

 in the island of Java. Celebes, the Moluccas, and the Philippines 

 were invaded at the same time. Burmah, Siam, and Singapore had 

 been ravaged the previous year, and it was believed that the latter 

 place, where so many streams of commercial movement meet, was the 

 source whence the infection was distributed over China and the 

 Malay Archipelago. The explanation was probably correct. By the 

 universal infection of all the ports of our Indian dependencies in 



