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5
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.
5. 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, infects 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