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conspire to invest it with an air of mystery. Like influenza,
it is the very type of an epidemic disease; and, therefore,
like epidemic diseases generally, has been largelv held to be
due to some atmospheric or telluric condition, some
peculiar "epidemic constitution," which, diffusing itself
from country to country, gives to the prevailing maladies
a choleraic character, and produces, when local circumstances
are favourable, an outbreak of the fully developed
disease. An argument in favour of this view was the
striking fact that, although Cholera affected large numbers
of persons within a short time, there was little evidence of
its communicability by direct contagion. It was noticed,
and has been constantly observed, that nurses or medical
men seldom take the disease from patients under their
charge, and that the introduction of Cholera patients into
a general hospital is by no means necessarily followed by
the communication of this disease to other patients.
Nevertheless, it has always happened that the spread
of Cholera epidemics has followed lines of traffic, showing
that human intercourse, not winds, has been instrumental
in their propagation. In every invasion of this country,
the disease has first been distinctly imported into our seaport
towns by the arrival thither of infected persons from
infected localities, and has been thence carried by like
means to other localities in direct relation with them by
railways or other lines of traffic, and has thus gradually
become distributed throughout the country, not generally
but by local outbreaks. The fact that cholera, though
obviously not directly contagious, or at any rate not directly
contagious in a high degree, yet had some mysterious
relation with the movements of mankind, and never broke