A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2) by Charles Creighton
CHAPTER IX.
536 words | Chapter 79
ASIATIC CHOLERA.
The Indian or Asiatic cholera, which first showed itself on British soil
in one or more houses on the Quay of Sunderland in the month of October,
1831, was a “new disease” in a more real sense than anything in this
country since the sweating sickness of 1485. The English profession had
been hearing a good deal about it for some years before it reached our
shores. The outbreak in Lower Bengal in 1817, from which the modern
history of cholera dates, had been the subject of reports and essays by
Anglo-Indian physicians and surgeons; an extensive prevalence of it in the
Madras Presidency shortly after, as well as in Mauritius in 1819 and 1829,
had been observed by other medical men in the service of the East India
Company or of the British army or navy. Many who had seen cholera in
India, and some who had written upon it, returned to England in due
course, so that the formidable new pestilence of the East began to be
heard of in medical circles at home. Various essays upon it issued from
the English press between 1821 and 1830[1475]; and in 1825 it appeared for
the first time, and at considerable length, in the pages of an English
systematic treatise, the new edition of Dr Mason Good’s ‘Study of
Medicine.’
Previous to 1829, Asiatic cholera had obtained no footing in Europe. The
first great movement westwards from India through Central Asia, which was
continuous with the memorable eruption in Bengal after the rains of 1817,
had reached to Astrakhan, at the mouths of the Volga, and had there caused
the deaths of some 144 persons in September, 1823. Another progress
westwards from India, after an interval of six years, reached the soil of
European Russia in the Government of Orenburg in August 1829, the
mortality in the whole province during the autumn and winter (to February,
1830) amounting to about one thousand. A much more severe epidemic of it
arose in the summer of 1830 in the town and province of Astrakhan
(supposed to have been introduced by an infected brig from Baku), which
spread with enormous rapidity, destroying in the course of a month some
four thousand in Astrakhan itself and upwards of twenty thousand in other
parts of the province[1476]. Thus established in the basin of the Volga,
Asiatic cholera overran the whole of Russia. Before the spring of 1831 it
had entered Hungary and Poland, and in the end of May had reached Danzig
and other German ports on the Baltic and North Seas. Lord Heytesbury, the
British Ambassador at St Petersburg, had sent home a despatch upon it
early in 1831; in April, the Admiralty issued orders for a strict
quarantine of all arrivals from Russia at British ports, which were
afterwards extended to arrivals from all ports abroad invaded or
threatened by cholera. On 20 June a royal proclamation ordering various
precautions was issued, and next day a Board of Health was gazetted,
composed of leading physicians in London and of the medical heads of
departments, with Sir Henry Halford as president. Local Boards of Health
were formed voluntarily in many parts of the country during the summer of
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