GREAT EPIDEMICS ASIATIC CHOLERA. 285 



that man, as an individual, has hardly any share in the 

 propagation of the evil. This physician asserts that neither 

 the living body, nor the corpse, nor the excretions of chol- 

 era-patients, have the power of retaining and increasing the 

 unknown miasma which is the cause of the diffusion of dis- 

 ease. Pettenkofer holds even that the origin of the chol- 

 era is not to be looked for in some special physiological 

 condition of the Indian population in the basin of the 

 Ganges ; that the pest must spring from certain circum- 

 stances of soil and climate ; and, further, that it can only be 

 diffused through the cooperation of certain telluric and at- 

 mospheric elements. It is, perhaps, going a little too far 

 to maintain that neither man nor animal matters take any 

 part in the production of the effluvia of cholera, and Petten- 

 kofer's theory, ingenious as it may seem, is not likely to be 

 generally adopted. The cholera sometimes is communi- 

 cated by means of persons who are themselves free from 

 it; this is the sole argument used by advocates of the 

 non-transmissible nature of the disease ; but it has little 

 force, if it can be shown that the germs of cholera may 

 have for their vehicle clothes, baggage, merchandise, etc. 

 Now, this has been proved by several authors ; among oth- 

 ers, Grimaud de Caux. The latter even asserts that he 

 has noticed, at the Marseilles post-office, cases of cholera 

 transmitted by packets of letters. 



Is the cholera contagious ? It is beyond dispute that 

 the cholera is brought into one country by collected masses 

 of men who have contracted it in another country ; but the 

 transmission is not direct. A person positively affected 

 with cholera does not transmit the malady to this or that 

 person who in his turn communicates it to another, and 

 so successively. The first patients who come into a healthy 

 place infect the local atmosphere, and in that infected at- 

 mosphere the germs of the disease multiply which will carry 

 off more or fewer victims ; but they may be found among 



