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HOW CHOLERA IS SPREAD.

Dr. John C. Peters, of this city, in a recent contribution to the Medical Record, gives the following interesting particulars: 

I have read many brilliant essays of late on these topics, but not with unalloyed pleasure, for I believe that many writers have fallen into errors which it is important to correct.  No really well informed person has believed for a long time that carbolic alcohol will destroy the cholera poison; but many fully and correctly believe that real germicides will.  It has been known since 1872 that microbes, bacilli, and bacteria could live in very strong solutions of carbolic alcohol, and that the dilute mineral acids, tannin, chloride, corrosive sublimate, and others would kill them.

In 1883 cholera did not arise alone in Egypt from filth, but from importation.  It did not commence at Alexandria, but at Damietta, which is the nearest Nile port to Port Said, which is the outlet of the Suez Canal.  There were 37,500 deaths from cholera in the Bombay Presidency in 1883.  Bombay merchants came both to Port Said and Damietta to attend a great fair there, to which at least 15,000 people congregated, in addition to the 35,000 inhabitants.  The barbers who shave and prepare the dead are the first registrars of vital statistics in many Egyptian towns, and the principal barber of Damietta was among the first to die of cholera; hence all the earliest records of deaths were lost, and the more fatal and infective diarrhoeal cases were never recorded.  Next the principal European physician of Damietta had his attention called to the rumors of numerous deaths, and investigated the matter, to find that cases of cholera had occurred in May, whereas none had been reported publicly until June 21.  A zadig, or canal, runs through Damietta from one branch of the Nile to another, and this is the principal source of the water supply.

Mosques and many houses are on the banks of this canal, and their drainage goes into it.  Every mosque has a public privy, and also a tank for the ablution, which all good Mohammedans must use before entering a holy place.  There was, of course, great choleraic water contamination, and a sudden outburst of cholera took place.  The 15,000 people who came to the fair were stampeded out of Damietta, together with about 10,000 of the inhabitants, who carried the disease with them back into Egypt.  Then only was a rigid quarantine established, and a cordon put round Damietta to keep everybody in, and let no one go out, neither food, medicines, doctors, nor supplies of any kind.  Such is nearly the history of every town attacked in Egypt in 1883.

When the pestilence had been let out en masse, severe measures were taken to keep it in Cairo, for up the Nile was attacked long before Alexandria suffered.  This cholera broke out, as it almost always does in Egypt, when the river Nile is low and the water unusually bad.  It disappeared like magic, as it always does in Egypt, when the Nile rises and washes all impurities away.  There had been little or no cholera in Egypt since 1865, and there had often been as much filth as in 1883.  It has never become endemic there, as it is a rainless country and generally too dry for the cholera germ to thrive.