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 few 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. Sédillot 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. Itsmovement 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.” 
