Passage to India
undergoing the process of putrefaction,” Moore acknowledged.
Perplexed, he wrote, “Although every precaution was taken to counteract the ill effects supposed to have originated in these causes, yet the complaint seemed to increase rather than to diminish. For several successive days, numerous cases, suffering from the same type of disease, were brought, aft for my inspection, by the head men (‘sirdars’) of these Indian labourers.”
Speculating about the sources of cholera being numerous, he argued that, “Numbers of the medical profession, who have interested themselves in ascertaining the actual condition of the poverty-stricken… by strolling through Indian villages; and viewing, for their immediate information, the heaps of nuisances which meet the eye at every corner, can be at no loss to account for the prevalence of disease, and for the mortality which follows in the wake of disease…”
Moore stressed, “such they (doctors) fail not to do,” in “so far as heaps of manure; so far as cesspools, half filled with stagnant water, and half filled with rotten vegetable, garbage; so far as huts, closely crowded together, ill-ventilated, built on swampy soil; so far as the wretched condition of the mass of the people, removed but one degree from actual starvation; so far as the carrion, half devoured by the village scavengers, swines and pariah dogs, kites, and vultures, contribute to the production and propagation of disease, in Indian towns and villages, through the medium of a foul, infected, pestiferous, and poisoned atmosphere…”
A 2012 piece in the “Lancet” disclosed that cholera is endemic in more than 50 countries, with seven epidemics dating from 1817 spreading from Asia to much of the world, as in Haiti recently. The 7th pandemic began in 1961 and affects 3–5 million people each year, killing 120,000. Descriptions of a disease thought to be cholera are found in Sanskrit dating to the 5th century B.C, but it was only around the 1850s the London physician John Snow proposed that cholera was a communicable disease spread by contaminated drinking water. The Italian anatomist, Filippo Pacini became posthumously famous for independently isolating the cholera bacterium “Vibrio cholerae” in 1854 when he first observed the commashaped forms under a microscope.
ID delves into the mysteries of the “Louisa Baillie” and Dr. Moore’s view that “the cleansing of the Augean stables, a work of Herculean labour, would dwindle into insignificance, compared with the cleansing of Indian villages in a single district.”