ey attend on the sick or not. Those who act upon the principle of
cholera being a highly contagious disease, may perhaps consider it
necessary to recommend, among their _precautions_, that the medical
men and attendants should be enveloped in those hideous dresses used
in some countries by those who approach plague patients[7]--fancy, in
the case of a sick female, or even of a man of pretty good nerves, the
effect of but half the precautions one hears of, as proper to be
observed. It is quite a mistake to suppose that the sick have not been
sometimes abandoned during the prevalence of epidemics; and that too
in cases where medical men had very erroneously voted the disease
contagious:--among other horrid things arising out of mistaken views,
who that has ever read it, can forget the account given by Dr.
Halloran, of the wretched yellow-fever patient in Spain, who, with a
rope tied round him, was dragged along for some distance by a guard,
when he was put into a shed, where he was suffered to die, without
even water to quench his thirst? I admit that, even with the views of
non-contagionists, difficulties obviously present themselves in regard
to the safety of those about the sick, when the latter are in such a
state as will not admit of their removal to a more auspicious spot
from that in which there is reason to believe they inhaled the noxious
atmosphere. From what has been observed in India and other places,
however, there is often sufficient warning in a feeling of _malaise_,
&c., and the distance to favoured spots, where people may be observed
not to be attacked, may be very short,--sometimes, as we have seen,
but a few yards, so that a removal of the patient, _with his friends_,
may be practicable, in a vast number of cases, previous to the setting
in of the more serious symptoms.

[Footnote 7: Since writing the above, I find that this scene has
actually occurred lately at Dantzic where a few miserable medical men
illustrated their doctrines of contagion, by skulking at a certain
distance about the sick, dressed up in oil skins, like the disgusting
figures we see in books, of the Marseilles doctors in the Lazaretto.
(See Sun Newspaper, 22nd, Nov.)]

I shall conclude this by cursorily referring to two circumstances which
have within a short time occurred on the Continent, and which seem to me
to be of no small importance in regard to cholera questions. It appears
that the committee appointed by the French Chamber