18 Relation of Microscopic Fungi to ['"iouS^JLuiTriS^^ 
direct. The direct evidence that fermented cholera stools produces 
the disease in man has not been furnished, but inferences entitle us 
with justice to assume that here, as in our experimental animals, 
the disease is produced by the introduction into the stomach of 
fermented cholera stool. 
We have certain evidence of a negative nature which confirms 
the positive proposition that the cholera poison enters the human 
body by the mouth. Cholera is not inoculable. If you prick your 
hand while making a post-mortem examination, or if you cut it 
intentionally and put in a little of the matter — even the putrescent 
intestinal matter — you will not thereby produce cholera in yourself. 
If the body be putrid, you may produce a putrefactive inoculation 
jast as from any ordinary anatomical subject, but you will not pro- 
duce cholera. If you take the blood of a cholera patient and inject 
it into animals, you will not thereby produce any symptoms of 
cholera. The experiments by inoculation have been made, particu- 
larly by Eussian physicians and surgeons — amongst them, Pirogoff. 
Now, the next negative point regarding the transfer of cholera, 
is that it cannot be transferred by the breath. I have many a 
time bent over cholera patients to smell their breath, and have 
taken it into my lungs fully and long, and have never perceived 
any ill effect from it ; and, in fact, the care which many persons, 
not only physicians, but others, have bestowed upon cholera patients 
shows that if certain precautions are observed, cholera is certainly 
not transplanted by the breath. 
But by what means, then, is cholera transferred from one man 
to another ? It is efiected in this way : that the cholera patient 
discharges rice-water which is thrown either into a room, or into 
linen, or into a bed, or goes into a closet or privy, or upon a dung- 
heap, or is mixed with water and runs into the watercourses ; and 
there the rice-water so distributed ferments, and after it has so fer- 
mented, a small particle of this fermented rice-water is transferred 
into the mouth and stomach of a healthy person. The evidence 
on that point is so convincing, and the instances which make it up 
are so numerous, that it is not necessary to repeat or multiply 
them. For instance, there is the great case which happened in 
Bavaria in 1854. There was there a male prison into which was 
admitted a man with cholera, and he infected eight or ten others, 
and the whole of the dirty soiled linen of those persons was sent 
with the other linen several miles off to a female prison to be 
washed. There had been no other introduction of any kind into 
that female prison, but a great proportion of the washerwomen who 
washed this choleraic linen were affected with cholera, and distributed 
it immediately in the female prison. Instances of that kind tell 
their own tale. I do not say that cholera is exclusively so distri- 
buted : there may be other means. But we assume that that which 
