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35
dressing you. The one great pathological fact,
which I have sought to bring into prominence for
your knowledge and application, is this:—that the
epidemic prevalence of Cholera does not arise in
some new cloud of venom, floating above reach
and control, high over successive lands, and raining
down upon them without difference its prepared
distillation of death ; but that—so far as scientific
analysis can decide, it depends on one occasional
phase of an influence which is always about us—on
one change of materials which in their other changes
give rise to other ills; that these materials, so perilously
prone to explode into one or other breath of
epidemic pestilence, are the dense exhalations of
animal uncleanness which infect, in varying proportion,
the entire area of our metropolis; and that,
from the nature of the case, it must remain optional
with those who witness the dreadful infliction,
whether they will indolently acquiesce in their continued
and increasing liabilities to a degrading
calamity, or will employ the requisite skill, science,
and energy, to remove from before their thresholds
these filthy sources of misfortune.
2. If, gentlemen, I have detained you long in
stating conclusions as to the habits of the disease,
and as to the significance of its local partialities, it
has been in order to render quite obvious to you the
intention of those precautionary measures which
it is now my duty to recommend.