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213
ordinary circumstances, the patient has no power
of infecting other persons except by means of these
discharges; nor any power of infecting even by
them except in so fas 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.
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