1885.] on Cholera : its Cause and Prevention. 301 



and short-sighted administrators of Italy and France. And it was, 

 I believe, on this ground judged necessary by her Majesty's Indian 

 Government to send out a special Commission for the purpose of 

 reporting generally on the practical bearing of the German investiga- 

 tions. The Commission was under the general guidance of Dr. Klein,* 

 who was selected on the recommendation of the highest scientific 

 authority in this country, as being the person who in England, 

 by his previous researches, had shown himself facile p'incejjs in 

 inquiries of this nature. The finding of the Commission was, that 

 although Dr. Koch was perfectly accurate in his statement of fact, 

 he had gone too far in inference. In other words, that although the 

 so-called cholera bacillus swarms in the intestine of every person 

 afl'ected with cholera, it does not there play the part which is 

 attributed to it. 



I shall, I think, most usefully conclude this paper by stating as 

 clearly as I can in what way the knowledge and experience already 

 obtained as regards the cause of the spread of cholera by the two 

 methods of inquiry which are available for the purpose (and which 

 for the moment I will call the epidemiological and the bacteriological) 

 may be brought to bear on practical questions. And here I will ask 

 the reader to note once more amid the apparent differences of opinion 

 which exist at the present moment, as regards some questions which 

 have lately come prominently to the front, between persons whose 

 competency cannot be denied, that such j^jersons are nevertheless 

 •in agreement, not only with respect to the sources of danger and the 

 means of guarding against them, but also as to the most fundamental 

 theoretical questions. Thus, for example, while we hesitate to admit 

 that the particular organisms which Dr. Koch has so carefully inves- 

 tigated have anything to do with the causation of cholera, the conclu- 

 sions arrived at nearly twenty years ago by the two leading autho- 

 rities of that time — Simon in England and Pettenkofer in Germany 

 — that cholera depends on an organism, and that its spread cannot 

 be accounted for in any other way, are as certainly true now as they 

 were then. But this certainty arises not from any direct evidence 

 which has up to this time been offered with reference to a jDarticular 

 bacillus, but from the various facts which go to show that in places 

 inftcted or haunted by cholera something else exists besides the 

 infected persons. So that if we could imagine all the infected 

 persons in such a locality to be removed by some act of absolute 

 power, such an act would not stop the j)rogress of the epidemic, for 

 cholera would still be there. 



Of the two methods of inquiry above referred to, the bacterio- 

 logical api^lies to the nature of the contagium itself, and the 

 epidemiological to the nature of the environing conditions which 



* The Commission consisted of Dr. Klein, F.R.S., and Dr. Heneage Gibbes. 

 The Report has onlj^ just been published, but the scientific results of the inquiry 

 were coinmunicHted by Dr. Klein to the Royal Society in February last. 



