dent as they were for their daily bread on the labour of the latter, now suffer from want of food-of course are more prone to receive the attacks of disease. Nor is this all-the minds of this class of people depressed by want, and their ignorant fears worked on by the alarmists, they are thrown into such a state of utter prostration as to render them not only subjects for disease, but also to place them in a great measure beyond the reach of medicine. How can we impress upon people's minds the necessity of cleanliness in their houses and persons, and of removing all filth and offensive matter from their yards, if we tell them that those measures are to prevent a contagious disease? Should we encourage them to have recourse to free ventilation, might they not express their fears that the wind would be the bearer of contagion from a city, or a house, in the direction from which the wind blew? But if after all, say these alarmists, the disease should prove to be contagious?-What answer can we make to those who shut their eyes and ears and forego the privilege of reasoning beings, to cling to their first impressions? We can only reply by supposing a case as probable as the one they advocate. If a comet should come near enough to this earth, and give us a switch of its tail-what then? The comet will not come near enough, says a common sense man. Then we say, the cholera has not been, and is not contagious, and will not be contagious, should it appear amongst us. It was at one time thought and believed by many good souls in the town of Salem, that an invisible and impalpable fluid darted from the eye of a witch, and penetrated the brain of the bewitched. Perhaps some may yet incline to this belief, and we think we hear them request that philosophers and people of discernment, generally, should lay aside their prejudices, and reason the affair with them, so as to settle the question With equal plausibility and modesty, may those who are ignorant of medicine and of medical inquiries, and medical evidence, ask physicians to forego their prejudices, that is the conclusions to which they have been led--that the cholera is not contagious; and to try and shape their creed according to the whims of these amateur alarmists.

But these alarmists are also found in the medical profession-they have even been influential enough (and the task was not difficult, considering the leaning of the great and little vulgar to the side of contagion) to have quarantines rigidly enforced, and all intercourse between places prevented. Medical gossip has been, on these occasions, found too strong for medical logic-and what have been the results? Let Dr. Granville speak of the measures of the English Board of Health. We give his own language as contained in his Catechism on Cholera.*

Q. What had the Board promised to the public, the non-fulfilment of which could lead to such a disappointment?

A.

The Board in their manifesto, the government in their orders in council, Sir Gilbert Blane in his warning to the British public, and, last and most,

*We always deem the cause of science to be paramount to all personal considerations; and hence refer to Dr. Granville's present views, with pleasure, although we have just cause of complaint at his plagiarism in copying without acknowledgment the American Catechism of Health, and calling it his own work.

the Quarterly Review in their archi-absurd articles contained in the 91st number, had led the public to believe that if the quarantine laws were strictly enforced, the disease would not appear amongst us. Now the quarantine laws were strictly enforced in the port of Sunderland, to the great inconvenience of their trade, and had never, as it has since been officially asserted, been infringed; yet cholera in its worst form made its appearance in that town, destroying its victims in the same frightful proportion in which the same malady was destroying them on the neighbouring coast of the continent, and with precisely the same symptoms.

Q. What led the Board to make such a promise, which has got them into so awkward a scrape?

A. A first and fatal error: that of supposing that severe and fatal cholera had never existed until it showed itself in India, in 1817; whereas even upon that point they are wrong, since the same disorder was described as fatally prevalent in the hospitals of Madras ten years before, under the vulgar and awful name of "mort-de chien," (dogs-death, from the acute suffering of the patient:) and a second still more fatal error, that of supposing the disease to possess the character of the plague, and of being transmitted from one place to another through the agency of man or merchandise, in order to account for its successive developement in various parts of Asia and Europe. Thus did these physicians reason: The cholera took its rise at the mouth of the Ganges; it went to China on the one side, and to Persia on the other; from thence to Russia, Poland, Austria, and Prussia. It is now at Hamburg, and if you do not prevent men and goods from being introduced into this country, from that city, or any other, where the cholera may be raging, the disease will be introduced along with them. What has happened? The introduction of men and goods were prevented, but not the appearance of the disease.

Q. What are we to conclude from that striking fact?

A. That the cholera is not a contagious disorder, but an epidemic one: that it is not a transmitted malady, but one spontaneously evolved in the countries in which it has raged, and likely to do so in Holland, France, Italy, and other countries hitherto free from it, in the course of the next two years. Q. I wish you would enable me, by some simple explanation, fully to comprehend the meaning of the two words you have just used-contagious and epidemic ?"

[Omitting the illustration of a contagious disease in the plague, we pass on to that part of the answer concerning an epidemic disease.]

"A family is taken ill at a particular season of the year with any known disease. Another family or person is soon afterwards similarly affected: and many more follow under the same circumstances, until the greater part of the inhabitants of a town or district have, more or less, experienced the same morbid influence on their system. The same occurrence may take place in a prison-a camp-an hospital-a manufactory-a ship:-the disease goes through its various stages, often unchecked by any effort that can be made to extinguish it. It disappears at last, and for a time, generally indefinite, does not occur again; or it re-appears at uncertain epochs: or another disease takes its place, following the same course, affecting equally the greater number of the inhabitants of the place or district where it appears, and terminating at last in the same manner. A catarrh is known to have affected, at particular epochs, two thirds of the inhabitants of a town. Carli, in his History of Verona, observes, that this disease had been so prevalent in 1438, that it overran the whole of Italy, and was principally fatal to children and old people. The influenza which prevailed in London in the year 1782 was of this class. The croup, the hooping-cough, &c. are known to make their appearance, some years, in particular places, where they at

tack indiscriminately many individuals. The former became so prevalent in some of the French provinces about the years 1809 and 1810, that Bonaparte offered a premium of 12,000 francs for the best treatise on that disease. An old physician, Sennertus, states, that a particular malignant fever with spasm afflicted the bishoprics of Cologne and Westphalia in 1596-7. While Mantua was beseiged by the French army in 1796, upwards of 25,000 citizens and soldiers perished from a peculiar fever: yet after the French army entered that town, no case of that disease occurred, either amongst the inhabitants or the garrison. We read in the History of France, by Mezerai, that a peculiar sort of cough, with fever, attacked generally and indiscriminately all the old people in Paris, during the months of February and March, 1414, and that the name of coqueluche was given to it from a particular cap called coqueluchon, used to keep off the cold air so pernicious in this complaint nearly the same with that which has since appeared in Paris, called Le Gripe, which is reported to have affected 140,000 inhabitants. During the siege of Genoa in 1799, a petechial fever prevailed among the garrison and the inhabitants, the greatest part of whom felt its bad effects: some parts of the town seemed more exposed to the influence of the disease than others, and a very limited residence in those parts was sufficient to develope the disease in a healthy individual. The same occurred a few years later at Leghorn-and again at Malaga; in both which places, sleeping one night only in the town was followed by the disease. The fever which has been called the typhus, followed both in England and Ireland, in 1817 and 1818, the same course. Particular districts of a town, and even particular parts of the same house, seemed more liable to the developement of the disease than others. The same is recorded of those febrile complaints which have prevailed in some parts of America within the last twenty years. Such again is not the history of contagious, but of EPIDEMIC diseases.”

Quarantine and sanitary cordons, were found of no avail in Russia, Prussia, or Austria. They did not keep off the disease from Astrachan, St. Petersburg, Dantzic, Berlin, Breslaw, Vienna, Hamburg, &c. &c. Let us be benefitted by these examples, and not imitate in the United States these cruel restrictions, more calculated to produce than to ward off the dreaded evil.

"It is clear and open to every inquirer," says Lefevre, in his observations on the disease at St. Petersburg, "that the Cholera did not occur in many places which had the greatest intercourse with Petersburg at the height of the malady, and that it broke out in many others which have been subjected to the strictest quarantines."

THE HEALTH ALMANAC for 1833, will be published and ready for sale to the trade, on the 1st of July next, by Key, Mielke, and Biddle.

Thomas Desilver, jr. Market street, has in press, and will speedily publish, a History of the Epidemic Cholera, and the means of preventing the disease; being a Report of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, to the Board of Health of the same city to which is added a full account of the Symptoms and Seats of the disease, and the Method of Treatment adopted in the different countries in which the Cholera has prevailed.-By John Bell, M. D. and D. F. Condie, M. D.

PAYMENT.

ALL persons indebted for this Journal, are requested to make immediate payment to the subscriber, as assignee of H. H. Porter, the former publisher. May 23, 1832.

S. POTTER, No. 27, Minor street.

It is a lamentable thing to see that for one step towards civilization men often make three towards degradation. We speak now of men in masses, such as constitute a people-not of the more favoured few, to whose comfort and luxuries the others administer. The motives by which persons congregated and settled to form towns, were-first, for protection against incursions of the Nomade robbers; secondly, with a view to foreign trade, and domestic manufacture. The secondary effects of this gathering together were increased splendour of the arts, and display of intellectual vigour, and refinement-rivalry in all the operations of the mind. But these benefits are counteracted by many evils. Ambition driving its votaries to every extreme, either of excellence or crime-a sensibility so morbid as to cease to acknowledge the influence of common impressions, a constantly craving for something monstrous and unnatural-feebleness of the body, for the want of pure air and adequate exercise -feebleness of the mind, where each leans, in a measure, upon his neighbour, for his comfort or amusement, and where the loftier emotions and aspirations are ridiculed as wild and ungraceful these are some of the disadvantages of a civic life. sense receives in a suitable degree its appropriate stimulus-the eyes either suffer from a glare of light, or do not receive enough: they are strained by the inspection of minute objects, or offended by various vapours, dust, fine particles given off from metals, stones, &c.—the ears are stunned by loud noises and discords, VOL. III-39

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worse than fabled Pandemonium itself:-the taste is stimulated by nearly every substance, or combination of substances, which ingenuity can devise, except simple and healthful nutriment. This necessary supply is half poisoned by the cookery of the rich, and does not reach the poor in cities. But most of all does the skin suffer—the complexion is not merely pale, it is ash-coloured, dingy, or sallow-the people of the cities become etiolated-they are in tens of thousands bleached for want of due exposure to the sun and air. They are pale, also, because the blood does not circulate through their bodies with that rapid, but yet even course, which results from living in the pure air of the country. The blood does not circulate evenly and rapidly, because the citizen does not exercise his body enough—we mean exercise all his limbs, and expand his chest-and because, as he breathes a close and impure air, the blood is not changed, as it ought to be, in the process of respiration-it does not acquire that rich vermilion colour, and the other properties, to fit it for being the pabulum of all the organs, the stimulus to all the functions. Look at those thousands and tens of thousands of miserable pale, wan, and often deformed beings, in the large manufacturing cities of Great Britain, and then ask whether she, whether the world does not pay too dear for the productions of her looms and her smitheries. It is for the people of the United States to take warning from her example, and not heedlessly hurry on the same melancholy state of things. It ought to be the practice, as it is the theory, of our republican institutions, that, whilst free scope is given to individual enterprise, and every man is insured the possession of all the advantages which he has obtained by his industry and skill, the unfortunate and the needy are not left in utter destitution, nor hopeless misery, but find in the government a kind parent protecting them against farther suffering, and opening anew the road to personal independence and comfort. It is not enough that the people should be made acquainted with the best means of preserving their health and preventing the ravages of disease, if the means are not readily accessible, without any material deduction from the product of their daily toil. Wherever people are crowded together in small ill ventilated apartments, in which they work by day and sleep by night, and are deprived of adequate exercise in the open air, they are always predisposed to direful diseases-call them malignant or typhus fevers, plague or cholera-what you will. Greatly are the probabilities of disease increased, if the persons thus unfavourably circumstanced be negligent of personal cleanliness, and fail to preserve the skin free from impurities by regular ablution.

That the inhabitants of all our cities and towns, and even villages, suffer in large numbers from these two evils, viz:—long