Letters from a Mourning City

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 7 whom the doctor has already made over to the priest, should unexpectedly recover. We stand here on unknown, untrodden ground; the usual indices, the patient's power of resistance, age, etc., all are at fault in this case. And whatever may have been said concerning cholera and other contagious diseases,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 7 whom the doctor has already made over to the priest, should unexpectedly recover. We stand here on unknown, untrodden ground; the usual indices, the patient's power of resistance, age, etc., all are at fault in this case. And whatever may have been said concerning cholera and other contagious diseases, that the virus loses its intensity with the actual decrease of the epidemic itself, that the cases towards the end are of a milder character?I cannot see that the argument holds good here. The cholera at the present moment is decidedly on the wane, in spite of which there are a number of these foudroyant cases every day. For instance, yesterday, during the morning inspection (at eight o'clock), seven cholera patients were received at the Santa Madda- lena Hospital, all seven had been perfectly well the previous night, and by ten P.M. six of them were already dead. People are now being struck down in the streets, just as they were during the worst days ofthe epidemic, and the man who drove me out to Granatello day before yesterday, fell off the box whilst waiting for me, dying four hours later ? the poor fellow never got his fare after all. And it was just the same last year in Egypt, when the cholera was supposed to be extinct in Alexandria; after twelve days, during which there had not been a single case at the cholera hospital, the disease returned with the same virulence in the case of one of the French doctors, poor Thuillier, who was roused at three o'clock one morning by the first symptoms of cholera, and about whom at eight o'clock the news had already been telegraphed to Paris that he was at the point of death True, that as far as he was concerned, a sort of artificial life had been kept up for about twelve hours, but it was absolutely useless, and almost cruel ...