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 codperation 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, ete. 
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 
