Choler

“ Choler, kol′ėr, n. the bile: (Shak.) biliousness: anger, irascibility.—adj. Chol′eric, full of choler: passionate. [Fr.,—L.,—Gr. cholera—cholē, bile.]
Cholera, kol′ėr-a, n. a highly infectious and deadly disease characterised by bilious vomiting and purging.—adj. Cholerā′ic.—British cholera, an acute catarrhal affection of the mucous membrane of the stomach and small intestines. [Gr. cholera.]
Cholesterine, ko-les′te-rin, n. a substance occurring abundantly in bile and biliary calculi, probably a monovalent alcohol.—adj. Cholester′ic. [Gr. cholē, bile, stereos, solid.] ”

“ They are much inclin’d to Choler, for hur Welch Plood is soon mov’d, and then hur stamp and stare, and scrat hur Pole, and vent hur Fury in Ud-splutter-a-nails, and will fight for hur Life in Battle at fisty-cuffs. They are polite in nothing but Faction and Sedition, for there are high and low Church Parties among them too, which occasions much Contention and Quarrels. ”

“ When cholera has broken out in a Burmese village the able-bodied men scramble on the roofs and lay about them with bamboos and billets of wood, while all the rest of the population, old and young, stand below and thump drums, blow trumpets, yell, scream, beat floors, walls, tin pans, everything to make a din. This uproar, repeated on three successive nights, is thought to be very effective in driving away the cholera demons. ”

“ The cholera visited the remote village. It smote the strong man in the pride of his strength, and the matron in the beauty of her prime; while it spared the helpless and the aged, the infant of a few days, and the parent of many years. ”

“ The poor little creature was on a bed, with her clothes on, supported on her weeping father’s arm—her countenance collapsed, and her hands characterized by all the signs of the second stage of cholera,—no indication of pulse—scarcely a sign of life—from all appearances, the disease had secured its prey. ”

“ These quotations show that cholera, whether as an epidemic or as sporadic disease, is no new thing in India. Almost in the beginning of the Portuguese expeditions to the East we find apparent examples of the visitations of this terrible scourge, though no precise name is given in the narratives. ”

“ I pray that I may never stand face to face with cholera again. Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere. They died like flies, crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old St. Paul’s.’
“Late one evening I hurried from a sick room to get a breath of air in the theatre below. My friend, the old priest, was there before me. ”

“ Urgent thirst is one of the most distressing symptoms in cholera; there is incessant craving for cold water, doubtless instinctive, to correct the inspissated condition of the blood, due to the rapid escape of the liquor sanguinis. It was formerly the practice to withhold water—a practice as cruel as it is mischievous. Water in abundance, pure and cold, should be given to the patient, and he should be encouraged to drink it, even should a large portion of it be rejected by the stomach; and when the purging has ceased, some may, with much advantage, be thrown into the bowel from time to time. ”

“ Clad in a light blue spangled tunic, with a blue and silver band across her chestnut hair, and little transparent wings affixed to her white shoulders, she placed one forefinger upon the other, and pointed with the prettiest impertinence at Goodman Cholera. Around the principal group, other maskers, more or less grotesque in appearance, waved each a banner, an which were inscriptions of a very anacreontic character, considering the circumstances:
“Down with the Cholera!” “Short and sweet!” “Laugh away, laugh always!” “We’ll collar the Cholera!” “Love forever!” “Wine forever!” ”

“ In those rare cases, called “cholera sicca,” in which no purging takes place, the intestines have been found distended with the excretion peculiar to the disease, 11whenever an examination of the body has taken place after death. In all the cases of cholera that I have attended, the loss of fluid from the stomach and bowels has been sufficient to account for the collapse, when the previous condition of the patient was taken into account, together with the suddenness of the loss, and the circumstance that the process of absorption appears to be suspended. ”

“ One of the children ill with cholera, in a cradle, two other little creatures, unconscious of what was passing, were playing about the room. I first endeavoured to quiet the minds of the women, impressing upon them, that there was not so much danger to be apprehended from the disease itself, as from giving way to such excessive alarm. That all excitement and agitation of the mind, tended to increase, if not to cause, an attack of the malady. I found the poor man very ill. ”

“ The stools and vomited matters in cholera consist of water, containing a small quantity of the salts of the blood, and a very little albuminous substance. The change in the blood is precisely that which the loss by the alimentary canal ought to produce; and, indeed, it is physically impossible that the alteration in the blood can be caused in any other way. The sweating which takes place in an advanced stage of the disease may increase the density of the blood to a trifling extent ”

“ The local cause in a house we know to be the illness of some individual, who, in many cases, has newly arrived from some place where the disease was prevailing.
EFFECT OF SEASON ON THE PREVALENCE OF CHOLERA. Each time when cholera has been introduced into England in the autumn, it has made but little progress, and has lingered rather than flourished during the winter and spring, to increase gradually during the following summer, reach its climax at the latter part of summer, and decline somewhat rapidly as the cool days of autumn set in. ”

“ CHOLERA RAGES
“Cholera is epidemic everywhere along the road,” wrote Jean in her diary on the 8th of June. “Our company is not yet attacked, but our dear mother is seriously alarmed. She counts all the graves we pass during the day, and sums them up at night for us to think about. Some days there is a formidable aggregate.”
The fame of Mrs. McAlpin’s skill as a physician and surgeon, and of Captain Ranger’s marvellous medicine-chest, grew rapidly in the front and rear of the Ranger train as the epidemic spread. ”

“ Yet, even here, with profound ignorance of the individual, we are not altogether unacquainted with some of the habits of these powerful predatory communities. Thus we know that cholera is eminently a low level disease, and that during its ravages we ought to pay particular attention to the water we drink. This is a general law of cholera, which is of the more importance to us because we cannot study the habits of the individual organisms that cause the disease. ”

“ I expressed the opinion in 1849, [20] that the increased prevalence of cholera in the low-lying districts of London depended entirely on the greater contamination of the water in these districts, and the comparative immunity from this disease of the population receiving the improved water from Thames Ditton, during the epidemics of last year and the present, as shown in the previous pages, entirely confirms this view of the subject; for the great bulk of this population live in the lowest districts of the metropolis. ”

“ British people would not desert their friends or relatives in illness, though they should incur danger by attending to them; but the truth is, that to look on cholera as a “catching” disease, which one may avoid by a few simple precautions, is a much less discouraging doctrine than that which supposes it to depend on some mysterious state of the atmosphere in which we are all of us immersed and obliged to breathe. ”

“ There is not a word in all these encomiums which is not a eulogy of the American people.
THE CHOLERA.
The disease called Asiatic Cholera is at home in India. It travels, at long intervals, into Europe. There have been eight: or nine of these visitations during the century. The disease travels with man and his belongings; and since intercourse between Asia and Europe has become more swift and abundant, there is a tendency to more frequent visits of the dreaded scourge. In fact, however, this tendency has been overcome by sanitary science. ”

“ The habitual use of ardent spirits, in the smallest quantity, seldom fails to invite the Cholera, and to render it ineurable when it takes place. Five-sixths of all who have fallen by the disease in England, it is computed were taken from the ranks of the intemperate and dissolute." Dr. Rhinelander, of the city of New York, who had an opportunity of witnessing the Cholera in Montreal, recommends "entire abstinence from spirituous liquors."-"Temperance," says he, "in every shape, is the great preventive. ”

“ CHOLERA IN THE DISTRICT OF THE CHELSEA WATER COMPANY. The districts supplied by the Chelsea Company have suffered a much greater mortality, during the recent epidemic, than the average of the whole metropolis, as the subjoined table (No. XIII) shows. But the mortality in these districts is only half as great as in the houses supplied by the Southwark and Vauxhall Company, who obtain their supply from the Thames just opposite the spot where the Chelsea Company obtain theirs. ”

“ There is no spot in this country in which the cholera 33was more fatal during the epidemic of 1832 than the village of Newburn, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We are informed, in an excellent paper on the subject by Dr. David Craigie, [8] that exactly one-tenth of the population died. The number of the inhabitants was five hundred and fifty; of these, three hundred and twenty suffered from the epidemic, either in the form of diarrhœa or the more confirmed disease, and the deaths amounted to fifty-five. ”

“ The reason of this probably is, that they never drink water, and are therefore exempted from imbibing the cholera poison in that vehicle.
The great prevalence of cholera along the course of rivers has been well known for a quarter of a century; and it meets with a satisfactory explanation from the mode of communication of the disease which I am inculcating. Rivers always receive the refuse of those living on the banks, and they nearly always supply, at the same time, the drinking water of the community so situated. ”

“ A name for cholera, in use, more or less, up to the end of the 18th century, and the former prevalence of which has tended probably to the extraordinary and baseless notion that epidemic cholera never existed in India till the governorship of the Marquis of Hastings. The word in this form is really a corruption of the Portuguese mordexim, shaped by a fanciful French etymology. The Portuguese word again represents the Konkani and Mahratti moḍachī, moḍshī, or moḍwashī, 'cholera,' from a Mahr. ”

“ The rich physician who had been curing others, could not save himself from the poison of the crowded graveyard which had been allowed to remain at the back of his house. By all sorts of strange and unfathomable judgments the cholera showed itself to be working, not by a blind necessity, but at the will of a thinking Person, of a living God, whose ways are not as our own ways, and His paths are in the great deep. ”

“ Baker, of Staines, who attended two hundred and sixty cases of cholera and diarrhœa in 1849, chiefly among the poor, informed me, in a letter with which he favoured me in December of that year, that “when the patients passed their stools involuntarily the disease evidently spread.” It is amongst the poor, where a whole family live, sleep, cook, eat, and wash in a single room, that cholera has been found to spread when once introduced, and still more in those places termed common lodging-houses, in which several families were crowded into a single room. ”

“ There is hardly a year when cholera does not appear among the pilgrims to Juggernaut, in consequence of the bad food they eat. The true Asiatic cholera had its origin here, and it is noticeable that every recurrence of the epidemic has had its beginning in the festivals connected with some of the Hindoo forms of worship. ”

“ The eggs of the tape-worm must undoubtedly pass down the sewers into the Thames, but it by no means follows that everybody who drinks a glass of the water should swallow one of the eggs. As regards the morbid matter of cholera, many other circumstances, besides the quantity of it which is present in a river at different periods of the epidemic, must influence the chances of its being swallowed, such as its remaining in a butt or other vessel till it is decomposed or devoured by animalcules, or its merely settling to the bottom and remaining there. ”

“ But from all that I have been able to learn of cholera, both from my own observations and the descriptions of others, I conclude that cholera invariably commences with the affection of the alimentary canal. The disease often proceeds with so little feeling of general illness, that the patient does not consider himself in danger, or even apply for advice, till the malady is far advanced. ”

“ In the case of the pump-well in Broad Street, Golden Square, if the cholera poison was contained in the minute whitish flocculi, visible on close inspection to the naked eye, some persons might drink of the water without taking any, as they soon settled to the bottom of the vessel. ”

“ Cholera has appeared in the bazār: the Hill-men are so much alarmed that they run away from service. My paharīs came to request I would let them all depart and pay them their wages: this I refused to do: they pleaded their fear of the cholera. At length they agreed to remain, if I would give them a kid to sacrifice to the angry goddess who resides in the mountain, and whom they believe has brought the illness amongst them—they are extremely superstitious. What can you expect from uneducated men? ”