Note 13 — Chapter III · THE ORIENTAL PLAGUE—QUESTION OF CONTAGION.

In the Times of to-day (September 8th), the contagious character of the plague is stoutly denied by one who seems to write from authority, or who at least is evidently well backed by a strong party. The writer is evidently one of the Commissioners who met in Paris some years ago to inquire into the working of the quarantine laws. I offer no opinion on the subject,—though “one-idea” men, they have a show of truth on their side, and especially in this, that they adopt the popular view of the subject when they deny the contagious nature of the plague. They boldly affirm that plague only spreads in places where sanitary regulations are despised—a consoling and useful theory, even if it were not true. They made the same assertions of cholera—their hypothesis proved sadly at fault. The pump-well water-drinking theory is the latest expression of medical theorists in respect of the origin of the cholera: there never was a greater delusion. It does not merit a refutation, and is quite unworthy the professors of even a conjectural art. That the symptoms of cholera strongly resemble the action of a violent poison taken into the stomach, is not to be questioned, and that water may have been the vehicle of such a poison is neither impossible nor even improbable. The iced-water drinking population of Paris, of Palermo, and of many Sicilian and Italian towns, suffered terribly from cholera. Nor does it spare the temperate Mahometan, upon whom cleanliness is enjoined as an article of his faith. Still, the wholly inexplicable facts in the spread of cholera (and the same may be said of plague, typhus, and yellow fever) are far too numerous to admit of any generalization. Whilst the cholera spared Birmingham—at the time neither properly drained nor sewered, it nearly depopulated Bilston, a healthy town situated only a few miles from Birmingham, hundreds in the meantime travelling between the two places every hour of the day. It swept off the inhabitants of one side of a street in Deptford, leaving those on the other side unscathed. All drank of the same waters. The theory merits no attention.