r matters, and would not bestow
much attention upon this subject, and accordingly neither
regulations nor preparations were made. All that was done was to
commission a Dr. Walker, a physician residing at St. Petersburg,
to go to Moscow and elsewhere and make enquiries into the nature
and progress of the disease, and report the result of his
investigation to us. He turned out, however, to be a very useless
and inefficient agent. In the meantime as the warm weather
returned the cholera again appeared in Russia, but still we took
no further measures until intelligence arrived that it had reached
Riga, at which place 700 or 800 sail of English vessels, loaded
principally with hemp and flax, were waiting to come to this
country. This report soon diffused a general alarm, and for many
days past the newspapers have been full of letters and full of
lies, and every sort of representation is made to Government or
through the press, as fear or interest happen to dictate. The
Consuls and Ministers abroad had been for some time supplying us
with such information as they could obtain, so that we were in
possession of a great deal of documentary evidence regarding the
nature, character, and progress of the disease. The first thing we
did was to issue two successive Orders in Council placing all
vessels coming from the Baltic in quarantine, and we sent for Sir
Henry Halford and placed all the papers we had in his hands,
desiring that he would associate with himself some other
practitioners, and report their opinion as speedily as possible
whether the disease was contagious and whether it could be
conveyed by goods. They reported the next day _yes_ to the first
question, _no_ to the second. In 1804, on the occasion of the
yellow fever at Gibraltar, Government formed a Board of Health,
and took the opinion of the College of Physicians, and it was
intended to pursue the same course in this instance, but Lords
Lansdowne and Auckland chose to take Halford's preliminary
opinion, contrary to my advice, for I foresaw that there would be
a great embarrassment if he and the College did not agree. Just so
it turned out, for when the case was submitted, with all the
papers, to the College, they would not adopt his opinion, much to
his annoyance, and, as I believe, because they did not like to be
merely called on to confirm what he had already said, and that
they thought their independence required a show of dissent. The
report they sent was very