n have no motive but that of ardent
research after truth, I know that I may always rely upon your
assistance and co-operation.

WILLIAM FERGUSSON,
Inspector-General of Hospitals.

_Windsor, Nov. 26, 1831._

LETTER III.

TO THE MEDICAL SOCIETY OF WINDSOR.

In this paper it is my intention to treat of the contagious diseases of
the British Isles, as well as to offer to the Society some observations
on malignant Cholera Morbus, and the mode of its propagation from the
tropical regions, where it first arose, to the colder latitudes of
Europe.

Having already published two letters on this last part of my subject,
I need not here take up your time in recapitulating their contents, but
proceed to the consideration of some remaining points of the enquiry;
which I find I have either overlooked, or not been so explicit in
illustration, as I otherwise might, had I been addressing a body of
professional men, instead of the community where I live, with the view
of _disabusing_ their minds from the effects of irrational panic, and
opening their eyes to what I deemed true measures of preservation
against the impending disease; and here I may as well add that when I
wrote in a newspaper and adopted the style suited to such a channel of
communication, I knew none so likely to attract the attention of those
influential men, who might possess the power and the will, when
disabused of prejudice, to enforce proper laws, instead of running the
course that had already been imposed upon them, by men interested in the
upholding of our quarantine establishments, or by prejudiced, however
well meaning, Boards of Health.

In looking over those letters, I find that the points most open to
dispute are the course of the disease throughout the Indian peninsula,
and its progress to the frontiers of Russia; as well as its supposed
infectious nature, and mode of propagation by human intercourse. In
regard to the first, there is no contagionist however avowed and
uncompromising, who does not admit that this erratic disease did not
often wander from its straight line when the most promising fields lay
directly before it; or stop short most unaccountably in its progress,
when the richest harvest of victims seemed actually within its
jaws--that its course was circuitous when, according to the laws of
contagion, it ought to have been straight,--that it refused its prey
at one time, and returned to it at another, in a manner that showed its