Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/284

 182 the disease observed its usual character, in seizing upon the aged and exhausted, in preference to the young and robust. Some of its first invasions were also found to be completely beyond the power of all remedial measures, and to hurry the sufferer with appalling rapidity to the grave; while many of its later attacks were more easily controlled. I am not in possession of documents to enable me to enter upon detailed statements, but so far as my own personal experience went, I am of opinion that not more than one in three of the cases ended fatally: the intensity of the disease had begun to abate in a fortnight, and its duration did not extend beyond one month. The funerals at St. Paul amounted to 96; at Penzance, to 64; and at Gulval, to 8; making a total of 163, in a population of about 12,000."

It was believed, at Penzance, that the cholera "was brought to Newlyn, from the North of Ireland, by fishermen who annually visit that coast;" but must say, that I think the suddenness of the inroad, rapid spread, and total disappearance of it, within the brief period of a single month, is very little characteristic of a contagious disease. If disposed to follow the ordinary laws of contagion, how came it, after having established so many foci whence the contagious atoms might be diffused, to depart, as it were, at once, leaving the vast majority of the population uncontaminated? Surely such results are much more explicable on the theory of some more general and exterior influence, than by the laws which, in all other cases, seem to regulate the transmission of diseases from one individual to another.