286 NATURE AND LIFE. 



people who have kept themselves entirely apart from those 

 affected, as well as among others who have been near them. 

 Very feve physicians die while attending such patients. It 

 may perhaps be useful to recall our personal experience on 

 this subject, and the observations we made during the epi- 

 demic of 1865, in connection with Legros and Goujon in 

 the laboratory of Robin at the practice school of the medical 

 faculty. Engaged for some months, and careless of any 

 special precautions, in handling and examining in all ways 

 the blood and excretions of cholera-patients, we suffered 

 no injurious effects, no inconvenience even. S6dillot re- 

 lates that during the campaign of Poland, in 1831, it hap- 

 pened to him more than once to sleep with impunity in 

 sheets just taken from patients who had died of cholera. 

 It is clear, therefore, that it is not transmitted by the con- 

 tact of persons or objects affected. It is the air which 

 within a more or less circumscribed space is the receiver 

 of that subtile and unknown matter that the poison lurks in ; 

 we say the receiver, not the vehicle, for the cholera-germ 

 which multiplies within that space has no spontaneous 

 tendency to move away from it. Its movement further and 

 its extension to a distance are occasioned by the constant 

 migrations of mankind. 



The very noticeable examinations of Tholozan have 

 placed it beyond doubt that, independently of the four great 

 epidemics, the cholera, since 1830, has hardly ceased at any 

 time to exist in Europe in different degrees of intensity 

 and under varying forms. Among us, as in India, it may 

 be epidemic, endemic, or sporadic. It has been attempted, 

 indeed, to mark a distinction between cholera which de- 

 stroys a great number of people at one time and that which 

 chooses only single victims ; ' but these two maladies offer 

 no fundamental specific differences. The first, when it has 



1 The latter has been called " nostras cholera," in opposition to "Asi- 

 atic cholera." 



