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nor any power of infecting even by them
except in so far as particles of them are enabled to
taint the food, water, or air, which people consume.
Thus, when a case of Cholera is imported into any
place, the disease is not likely to spread, unless in
proportion as it finds, locally open to it, certain
facilities for spreading by indirect infection.
In order rightly to appreciate what these facilities
must be, the following considerations have to be
borne in mind —first, that any choleraic discharge,
cast without previous thorough disinfection into any
cesspool or drain, or other depository or conduit of
filth, has a faculty of infecting the excremental
matters with which it there mingles, and probably,
more or less, the effluvia which those matters
evolve; secondly, that the infective power of
choleraic discharges attaches to whatever bedding,
clothing, towels and like things, have been imbued
with them, and renders these things, if not
thoroughly disinfected, as capable of spreading the
disease in places to which they are sent (for
washing or other purposes) as, in like circumstances,
the patient himself would be; thirdly, that if, by
leakage or soakage from cesspools or drains, or
through reckless casting out of slops and washwater,
any taint (however small) of the infective
material gets access to wells or other sources of
drinking water, it imparts to enormous volumes of
water the power of propagating the disease. When
due regard is had to these possibilities of indirect
infection, there will be no difficulty in understanding
that even a single case of Cholera, perhaps of the
slightest degree, and perhaps quite unsuspected in
its neighbourhood, may, if local circumstances co-