f Dr. Macmichael's pamphlet was intended altogether for readers not of
the profession, _which seems very probable_, his purposes will perhaps
be answered, at least for a time, but I do not see how it can make an
impression on medical men. Why not have been a little more candid when
quoting Sydenham on small-pox, &c. and have quoted what that author says
of the disease which he (Dr. M.) professes to write about,--the cholera?
The public would have means of judging how far the disease which was
prevalent in 1669, resembled the "cholera spasmodica," &c., of late
years. Many insist upon an identity (Orton among others), and yet
Sydenham saw no reason for suspecting a communicable property. It might
have been more to the point had Dr. Macmichael, instead of quoting old
authorities on small-pox, measles, &c. quoted some authorities to
disprove that Orton and others are wrong when they state it as their
belief that some of those old epidemics in Europe, about which so much
obscurity hangs, were nothing more or less than the cholera spasmodica.
Mead's short sketch of the "sweating sickness" does not seem very
inapplicable:--"Excessive fainting and inquietude inward burnings,
headach, sweating, vomiting, and diarrhoea."[4] In the letter to the
President of the College we see no small anxiety to prove that the
malignant cholera is of modern origin also in India, for the proofs from
Hindoo authorities, as given in the volume of _Madras Reports_, are
slighted. These Reports, as well as those of the other presidencies,
are exceedingly scarce, but whoever can obtain access to them will find
in the translations at pp. 253 and 255 (not at page 3, as quoted by
Dr. Macmichael), enough probably to satisfy him that cholera is the
disease alluded to there. But I think that we have at page 31 of
Dr. Macmichael's letter, no small proof of a peculiarity of opinion, when
we find that he there states that the evidence in the _Madras Reports_
of the existence of epidemics of malignant cholera in India, on several
occasions previous to 1817, rests on imperfect records, and that the
description of the disease is too vague to prove the identity with the
modern spasmodic cholera; for in this opinion he seems, as far as I have
been able to discover, to stand alone among writers on cholera;--indeed
it seems established, _on the fullest authority_, that cholera, in the
same form in which it has appeared epidemically of late years, has
committed ravages in