ony of the
thirty-six survivors, whether we took any precautions in putting them
into the bath or in handling them--whether we were not seated sometimes
on the bed of one, sometimes on that of another, talking to them. On
returning home directly from the hospital, and without using chloride
of lime, or changing my clothes, I sat down to table with my family, and
received the caresses of my children, firmly convinced that I did not
bring them a fatal poison either in my clothes or in my breath. Nobody
shut his door either against me or my colleagues; nobody was afraid to
touch the hand of the physician who came direct from an hospital--that
hand which had just before wiped the perspiration from the brow of
cholera patients. From the time that people had experience of the
disease, nobody that I am aware of shunned the sick." Who, after this,
can read over with common patience directions for the separation of a
cholera patient from his friends, as if "_an accursed thing_?" or who
(_il faut trancher le mot_) will now follow those directions?

As to the good Sir Gilbert Blane, who has distributed far and wide a
circular containing a description the most _naive_ on record, of the
epidemic cholera, hard must be the heart which could refuse making
the allowance which he claims for himself and his memoir; and though
he brands those who see, in his account of the marchings and
counter-marchings of the disease, nothing on a level with the
intellect of the present age, as a parcel of prejudiced imbeciles,
we must still feel towards him all the respect due to a parent arrived
at a time of life when things are not as they were wont to be,
_nec mens, nec aetas_. I may be among those he accuses of sometimes
employing "unintelligible jargon," but shall not retort while I confess
my inability to understand such expressions as "some obscure occurrence
of unwholesome circumstances" which seem to have, according to him,
both "brought" the disease to Jessore in 1817, and produced it there
at the same time. Sir Gilbert marks out for the public what he
considers as forming one of the principal differences between the
English and Indian cholera, viz. that in the latter the discharges
"consist of a liquid resembling thin gruel, in the English disease
they are feculent and bilious." Now if he has read the India reports,
he must have found abundance of evidence showing that sometimes there
were _even bilious stools_[12] not at all like what he des