tremely _feasible_ in regard to others, will,
if he goes over the evidence again, I am sure, be shown not to apply to
cholera, which is strictly a disease of _places_, not persons, and can
no more be generated by individuals than ague itself can. I can only say
of it, with the philosophic poet, that--

--------------------"A secret venom oft
Corrupts the air, the water, and the land."

Mr. Searle, an English gentleman, well known for his work on cholera,
has just returned from Warsaw, where he had the charge of the principal
cholera hospital during the epidemic. The statements of this gentleman
respecting contagion, being now published, I am induced from their high
interest to give them here:--

"I have only to add my most entire conviction that the disease is not
contagious, or, in other words, communicable from one person to another
in the ordinary sense of the words--a conviction, which, is founded not
only upon the nature of the disease, but also upon observations made
with reference to the subject, during a period of no less than fourteen
years. Facts, however, being deservedly of more weight than mere
opinions, I beg leave to adduce the following, in the hope of relieving
the minds of the timid from that groundless alarm, which might otherwise
not only interfere with or prevent the proper attendance upon the sick,
but becomes itself a pre-disposing or exciting cause of the disease; all
parties agreeing that of all the debilitating agencies operating upon
the human system, there is no one which tends to render it so peculiarly
susceptible of disease, and of cholera in particular, than fear.

"The facts referred to are these:--during two months of the period, that
I was physician to the principal hospital at Warsaw, devoted to the
reception and treatment of this disease, out of about thirty persons
attached to the hospital, the greater number of them were in constant
attendance upon the sick, which latter were, to the number of from
thirty to sixty, constantly under treatment; there were, therefore,
patients in every stage of the disease. Several of these attendants,
slept every night in the same apartments with the sick, on the beds
which happened to be unoccupied, with all the windows and doors
frequently closed. These men, too, were further employed in assisting
at the dissection of, and sewing up of, the bodies of such as were
examined, which were very numerous; cleansing also the dissecting-room,
and buryin