bsistance of thousands, and all for the
gratification of a prejudice which has been proved to be utterly
baseless in every country of Europe from Archangel to Hamburgh and
Sunderland. Happily for our country, these measures are now as absurd
and impracticable as they would be tyrannical and unjust. They could not
be borne even under the despotic military sway of Prussia and Russia,
and in this free country it would be impossible to enforce them for a
single week. The very attempt would at once, throughout the whole land,
produce confusion and misery incalculable.

I say, on the contrary, throw open their dwellings to the free air
of heaven, the best cordial and diluent of foul atmosphere in every
disease--let their fellow townsmen hasten to carry them food,
fuel, cordials, cloathing, and bedding, speak to them the words of
consolation, and should they have fear to approach the sick, I take
it upon me to say, they will be accompanied by any and every medical
practitioner of the place, who, in their presence, will minister to the
afflicted, inspire their breath, and perform every other professional
office of humanity, without the smallest fear or risk of infection; for
they read the daily records of their profession, where it has been
proved to them, that in the open but crowded hospitals of Warsaw, under
the most embarrassing circumstances of warfare and disease, out of a
hundred medical men, with their assistants and attendants, frequenting
the sick wards of Cholera, not one took the disease; that, for the sake
of proving its nature, they even went so far as to clothe themselves
with the vestments of the dying, to sleep in the beds of the recently
dead, and to innoculate themselves in every way with the blood and
fluids of the worst cases, without, in a single instance, producing
Cholera Morbus.[20] The accounts may not, indeed, cannot be the same
from every other quarter, for medical men must be as liable to fall
under the influence of an atmospherical epidemic disease as other
classes of the community; but the above fact is alone sufficient to
prove that it cannot be a personal contagion.

[Footnote 20: Vide Medical Gazette.]

Even should that worst of true contagions, the plague of the Levant,
which every nation is bound to guard against, despite of all our
precautions, be introduced amongst us, measures better calculated for
the destruction of a community, could scarcely be devised, than the
ancient quarantine re