CHOLERA ASIATICA. 



do. It is no longer surprising that cholera should follow the routes of 

 travel, that it should spread sometimes with the wind, sometimes 

 against it; sometimes from west to east, again from east to west. 

 The long leaps that cholera epidemics often make are simply due to 

 the fact that travelling cholera patients only infect those places where 

 they leave their dejections, while all intervening places escape. If 

 the cholera germ were contained in the dejections of those patients 

 only who suffered from the severest form of the disease (cholera as- 

 phyxia), as they cannot travel, long springs of cholera epidemics could 

 only occur when persons infected with cholera poison travelled during 

 the period of incubation, and the disease did not fully develop in them 

 till they had reached some place distant from their previous residence. 

 But besides such cases, among which are the cases in Magdeburg 

 above mentioned, numerous examples show that a person suffering 

 from simple choleraic diarrhoea, and who does not feel very sick at the 

 time, nor even become so later, contains the germs of cholera, so that 

 he may infect a privy, and thus start an epidemic. 



Against the view that cholera was spread by the evacuations of 

 the patients, it has been urged among other things that in some cases 

 persons who had swallowed the dejections of cholera patients escaped 

 the disease, and that attempts to give animals cholera, by introducing 

 into their bodies the contents of the intestines of patients who had 

 died of cholera, or the evacuations of cholera patients, had generally 

 failed. These facts cannot be denied. To make them agree with 

 those above mentioned, it has been suggested that the recent dejec- 

 tions of cholera patients do not contain the cholera germ in the stage 

 of development necessary to infection, nor in the necessary amount, but 

 that the dejections only become dangerous when the germs of the dis- 

 ease are placed under circumstances favorable to their development 

 and increase, by admixture with decomposing animal substances. This 

 hypothesis is very plausible, and has been generally accepted, as it is 

 supported by numerous facts ; for, while, according to the observations 

 of Thiersch, recent cholera dejections were not dangerous for animals, 

 feeding them with old dejections of the same sort induced cholera. 

 Experience has taught that persons who wash the clothes of cholera 

 patients, after they have lain for some time, and persons who change 

 the bed-clothes a few days after the death of the patient, are more apt 

 to be infected than those who place the bed-pan under the patient, 01 

 replace the wet sheets by dry ones. It is most dangerous for the per- 

 sons in a house, if the evacuations of a cholera patient are emptied 

 into a privy filled with excrement, into a cess-pool, or thrown on a 

 dung-hill. At such places the cholera germ seems to find circum- 

 stances most favorable to its development and increase. 



