This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893. Excerpt: ... THE CHICAGO CLINICAL REVIEW. VOL. II. JULY, 1893. NO. 4. CHOLERA: WHERE IT COMES FROM AND HOW IT IS PROPAGATED By Ernest Hart. EDITOR OF THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL; CHAIRMAN OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL t HEALTH SOCIETY. (An address delivered before the American Medical Association on June 7, 1893.) The old notions which half a century ago--indeed much more recently--attributed cholera to the operation of "tel- luric" and "meteoric" influences, "atmospheric" and "pandemic" waves, "cholera blasts," and other mysterious agencies, are happily now becoming things of the past, though eminent writers are still to be found who discuss the spread of cholera from the point of view of some "general influence or "choleraic influence," to the obscuring of other agencies which the overwhelming evidence of past epidemics has shown to be of superior and more practical importance. Even as recently as the great Russian epidemic of 1892, a clever English, though happily non-medical, writer (Hall Caine), referred to "the cholera insect which flies across the frontier," and I have been gravely apprised during the last year, from one or two quarters of "blue mists" and "plagues of flies," such as were observed during previous choleraepi demies. Ideas of this sort may, perhaps, be pardonable among such unenlightened communities as last year destroyed the cholera hospitals hastilj provided at Astrakhan and Saratoff to receive the victims of the advancing scourge, and cruelly maltreated the doctors who, in the midst of superstition and filth, were battling with its subtleties. But it is desirable to put aside these theories, or leave them for academic discussion, and to deal with the spread of cholera practically in the light of the accumulated evidence afforded by all the great epi...