Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/649

Rh The constant periodicity of cholera in Calcutta or Madras can not thus be cleared up. In the same way it is impossible to understand on this doctrine how it is that the hot, dry season, which must be destructive to the bacilli, is the period during which cholera is most prevalent, and how it is that in the hot and wet season, which is favorable to the growth of bacilli, cholera is at its lowest ebb. That cholera and typhoid fever are more flourishing when the ground-water is sinking than when it is rising has been explained by the drinking-water theorists on the view that when the ground-water is falling it becomes more concentrated, thicker, and therefore more dangerous. Now, the prolonged researches of Wagner, Aubry, and Port have proved the direct opposite. When the ground-water is low it is always purer than when high. Dr. Port has studied for a number of years the state of the water in the garrisons of Munich, with a view of watching its relations with the movement of typhoid fever, and he has found that when the water began to be impure then a falling off in the disease might be predicted. Why this should be do has received an experimental explanation from Dr. Franz Hoffmann. Great and numerous are the objections to the explanation of the local disposition to cholera by means of the drinking-water doctrine. Lyons was until the year 1858 supplied with water from superficial wells. The analyses of the waters from a number of the wells prior to the introduction of a better supply would astonish any one. The contagionists get out of their difficulties by merely asserting that though it is always the water which transmits cholera, yet there are a thousand ways in which this may be accomplished. But we have already shown that severe epidemics may occur without drinking-water being implicated, and consequently it is questionable whether, in those epidemics where the water may have been a factor, other causes did not play a more important part in the development of the malady. It is for the contagionists to prove why the infection by drinking-water can only be verified in certain cases. The most popular argument of the contagionists is the proposition that cholera spreads by human intercourse, a fact which I unhesitatingly accept. But the interpretation which the contagionists put upon the fact is nullified by the fact itself, as is shown by a closer study of all the influences of intercommunication, whether by land or sea.

In many regions there are main streets running in watered valleys in the direction of the stream, and yet other principal streets having a direction at right angles to that of the stream. In these streets, as is well known, at short intervals there exist sites which may be dotted on a special map where the frequency of cholera may be investigated, just as I had done for the epidemic of 1854 in Bavaria. It transpired that the sites of the epidemic preferred to spread in the length of those streets in the valleys which followed the course of the stream. When, however, one investigated the epidemic spots in streets which cross valleys between which hills or table-lands lie, it was found that