lls for
the establishment of quarantine in our ports, tells us that neither
proximity nor contact with the sick,[26] is requisite for the production
of the disease: now can anything further be wanting beyond this
admission, to prove that it must be an epidemic atmospherical poison,
and not a personal contagion, and that, under such circumstances, the
establishment of quarantine against persons and goods, would manifestly
be absurd and uncalled for. So fully satisfied has the Austrian
Government been made by experience, of the futility and cruelty of such
quarantines, that the Emperor apologises to his subjects for having
inflicted them. The King of Prussia makes a similar _amende_, and the
Emperor of Russia convinced by the same experience, abolished or greatly
relaxed his quarantines several mouths ago.

[Footnote 26: Vide Reports from Russia.]

I am by no means prepared to assert, because I cannot possibly know to
the contrary, although from the analogy of other disease I do not
believe it, that the Cholera Morbus may not become contagious under
certain conditions of the atmosphere, but these cannot be made subject
to quarantine laws, and I am fully prepared to acknowledge, that as in
the case of other epidemics, it may be made contagious through defective
police; but independent of these, it possesses other powers and
qualities of self-diffusion, which we can neither understand nor
controul. Such, however, is not the case with that other phantom of
our quarantine laws--the yellow fever--which can never, under any
circumstances of atmosphere, without the aid of the last be made a
contagious disease. I speak thus decisively from my experience of its
character, as one of the survivors of the St. Domingo war, where, in a
period of little more than four years, nearly 700 British commissioned
officers, and 30,000 men were swept away by its virulence; as also from
subsequent experience, after an interval of 20 years, when in the course
of time and service, I became principal medical officer of the windward
and leeward colonies, and in that capacity, surveyed and reported upon
the whole of these transatlantic possessions.

It was my intention, in these times of panic, to designate to my
countrymen, in as far as I could, the true essential intrinsic
contagions of the British Isles, (for such there are, and terrible ones
too,) which prevail under all circumstances of season, atmosphere, and
locality, as contradistinguished