Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/648

630 cholera found their way into a jug of drinking-water, and the mixture was exposed to the heat of the sun for the day. Early the next morning a small quantity of this water was drunk by nineteen individuals. Nothing was noticed, either in the appearance or taste of the water, by those who had partaken of it. All remained well during the first day. On the following morning one man was seized with cholera as he awoke; the others remained well till the second day had passed, when two more cases of cholera occurred, and the day after that two other cases were observed. The rest of the party remained well till sunset of the third day, when again two were seized with illness. These were the last cases, and the other fourteen persons continued to enjoy immunity from Diarrhœa, cholera, or any disturbance of health." This case is, etiologically, not worth much. Where was the original case from which the infection was supposed to have come? Was it not possible for the nineteen persons to be brought under the same circumstances as those under which the original case had become affected? Were the nineteen in a place which was as a rule free from cholera, and could they only be affected through the drinking-water? Several cases in India are known to me where guests at a banquet having drunk no water were yet the victims of cholera. For instance, at a baptismal feast which a sergeant gave, a gallon and a half (six litres and three quarters) of rum was supplied. Twelve persons, including the man and his wife, sat down to the banquet, and on the following evening the whole of the group, except the baby which still lives in Calcutta, were in their graves. At this feast there was no question of a mixture of anything with the stools of cholera.

When I ask myself how it is that men usually astute can place such implicit reliance on the drinking-water theory, which entails such ambiguity and contradiction, I can only think of two reasons. Partly, no doubt, there exists the belief that on general hygienic grounds no stone should be left unturned in order to procure a good supply of water where it had previously been bad, and thus the fear of death and the devil proves stronger than the love of truth and God. Again, the drinking-water doctrine appears to many to be the lesser evil as compared with the threatening local and periodical predisposition, which implies a more mysterious and less definable conception. They imagine that the (to them) uncomfortable facts of time and place may be explained on the drinking-water doctrine. The places where the cholera excreta can contaminate the drinking-water have a local disposition, and the times at which even cholera prevails, and excreta may contaminate springs and water-courses, have to do with periodical dispositions, and thus they escape from explaining the subtile influences of soil and ground-water. But any one who thoroughly investigates the local and periodical factors in epidemics of cholera must reject such an explanation. A study of the tables previously given from Brauser places great obstacles in the way of accepting these doctrines.