less, and exposed, must always afford ready materials for
any epidemic to work upon, and this may have given currency to the
prevailing opinion; but I rather believe, when enquiry comes to be made,
it will be found that the worst ravages of Cholera Morbus have been
experienced in the great level open plains of Upper Germany, and the
boundless jungly districts of India, remote from, or at least
unconnected with water communication, denoting thereby atmospheric
influence and agency, rather than any other.

Another consideration of some importance is the burial of the dead,
which according to published reports, has in some places been enforced
in so hurried a manner as deeply to wound the feelings of surviving
relatives, and in others to give rise to the horrid suspicion of
premature interment. Can this have been necessary in any disease, even
allowing it to be contagious, or was it wise and dignified in the
medical profession to make this concession to popular prejudice, at all
times when excited, so unmanageable and troublesome. Although we cannot
analyse the matter of contagion, we surely know enough of it to feel
assured, that it must be a production and exhalation from the living
body, arising out of certain processes going on there, in other words
out of the disease itself, which disease must cease along with the life
of the patient, and the exhalation be furnished no longer--that during
life it was sublimed, so as to leave the body and become diffused around
through the agency of the animal heat, created by the functions of
respiration and circulation of the blood, which being foreclosed and the
supplies cut off, all that remained of it floating before death in the
atmosphere, must be condensed upon the cold corpse and lie harmless.[31]
It must also be evident that when putrefaction begins, no production of
what belonged to the living body can remain unchanged, but must undergo
the transformation in form, substance and quality, ordained for all
things; for putrefaction, although it may possibly produce a disease
after its own character, is not pestilence, nor even compatible with it
in the case of specific diseases.

[Footnote 31: Even when a living product, we are authorised to believe,
from observations made upon the plague, that it cannot be propelled to
a greater distance than a few feet from the body of the patient--that it
is heavier than common air, settling down in a remarkable manner upon
the sick bed, and