great additional number always required on those occasions, precludes
the supposition of the majority so employed being _seasoned_ hospital
attendants, having constitutions impenetrable to contagion. Those
questions are _now_ well understood as to yellow fever, about which so
much misconception had once existed. The proofs by disinterested authors
(by which I mean those unconnected with quarantine establishments, or
who are not governed by the _expediency_ of the case) in the West
Indies, America, and other places, show this in a clear light; but the
proofs which have for some time past appeared in various journals
respecting the occurrences at Gibraltar, during the epidemic of 1828,
are particularly illustrative. By the testimony of three or four
writers, we find that _within certain points_, those in attendance on
sick, in houses as well as hospitals, were attacked with the fever, in
common with those who were not in attendance on sick; but that, where
people remained at ever so short a distance beyond those points, during
the epidemic influence, _not a single instance_ occurred of their being
attacked, though great numbers had been in the closest contact with the
sick, and frequently too, it would appear, under circumstances when
contagion, had it existed, was not impeded in its usual course by a very
free atmosphere:--_sick individuals, for instance, lying in a small
house, hut, or tent, surrounded, during a longer or shorter space of
time, by their relatives, &c._ A full exposure of some very curious
mis-statements on these points, made by our medical chief of the
quarantine, will be found from the pen of the surgeon of the 23d
regiment, in the _Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal_, No. 106.[3]
Those who are acquainted with the progress of cholera in India, must be
aware how a difference in the height of places, or of a few hundred
yards (_indeed sometimes of a few yards_) distance, has been observed to
make all the difference between great suffering and complete
immunity:--the printed and manuscript reports from India furnish a vast
number of instances of this kind; and, incredible as it may appear, they
furnish instances where, _notwithstanding the freest intercourse_, there
has been an abrupt line of demarcation observed, beyond which the
disease did not prevail. A most remarkable instance of this occurred in
the King's 14th regiment, in 1819, during a cholera epidemic, when the
light company of the regiment