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51
involve a considerable desertion of particular localities,
and a transient injury to their commerce.
This unavoidable result of proclaiming the laws of
the disease, I must regret in regard of its personal
bearings. But the facts of the case are all-important
for the public, and sanitary improvement will
perhaps move more quickly in the country, when it
is known that the pecuniary prosperity of places
may suffer from their reputation for endemic disease.
In case of Cholera prevailing with severity in
spots containing a dense poor population, great
assitance would be given to medical and sanitary
measures, if a number of empty unlet houses,
healthily situated, were at disposal of the authorities;
into which, under proper regulations, they might
induce certain of the poorest families to migrate for
a time, as to places of refuge, till the disease should
have subsided about their original dwellings.
For persons, whose circumstances or duties
retain them unavoidably in the midst of those
suffering districts where the poison is most active,
the best counsel I can offer—even if at first hearing
it seem vague, is, that they should be vigilant as to
preserving the greatest possible soundness and vigor
of general health; keeping the body, so far as may
be, undisturbed by extremes of heat and cold,
undepressed by long confinement, unfluttered by
violent passions, unexhausted by physical or mental
fatigue, untried by any excess or any privation;
taking for diet a sufficiency of fit and nutritive food,
rather in generous measure than otherwise, but far