316 OFFICIAL REFUTATION OF DR. KOCH’S THEORY 
(d) That the comma-shaped bacilli ordinarily found in cholera 
do not induce that disease in the lower animals, and that there 
are no real grounds for assuming that they do so in man; 
while the circumstance that they have been found in tanks 
which constituted the ordinary water supply of adjacent villages 
unassociated with the presence of the disease goes to negative 
any such assumption. 
16. Drs. Klein and Gibbes have made a valuable contyri- 
bution to our knowledge of the bacterial organisms associated 
with cholera, though the evidence hitherto adduced does not 
warrant the conclusion that any of them bear a causative rela- 
tion to the disease. As regards the question of its essential 
cause, the Committee are glad to learn that the Government 
of India are making further arrangements for having investi- 
gations, of a varied character, continuously conducted in that 
country under the direction of Dr. Douglas Cunningham. 
17. Although the precise cause of cholera has not been 
ascertained, sufficient is known of the general character of the 
disease to serve as trustworthy basis for practical action, and 
the Committee feel that they ought not to separate without 
expressing their conviction that sanitary measures in their true 
sense, and sanitary measures alone, are the only trustworthy 
means to prevent outbreaks of the disease, and to restrain its 
spread and mitigate the severity when it is prevalent. Experi- 
ence in Europe and in the East has shown that sanitary cordons 
and quarantine restrictions (under whatsoever form) are not 
only useless as means for arresting the progress of cholera, 
but positively injurious; and this not merely because of the 
many unavoidable hardships which their enforcement involves, 
but also because they tend to create alarm during pertods of 
epidemics of the disease, and to divert public attention at 
other times from the necessity which constantly exists for the 
prosecution of sanitary measures of assured value—measures 
which, moreover, tend to mitigate the incidence of all forms of 
disease. 
August 4th, 1885. 
