It connected with the commerce and the customs of India, and also what we are more particularly concerned in-gives a distinct and positive notice of the existence of cholera. is known, indeed, from Sanscrit writings that cholera is a disease of extreme antiquity in India; but from Dorta's days downwards we have a nearly uninterrupted chain of European evidence concerning it. Dorta describes the disease accurately does not talk of it as a new malady, says that it prevails most in June and July, and gives an account of the native treatment of it, which is very much the same as the ordinary treatment of cholera by natives at the present time. But he has done more than this; he has most fortunately afforded a clue to the history of the disease by giving two names for it, one that of the Mahrattas, and which was commonly adopted by the Portuguese, who express the sound sh by x-mordshi, or mordeshin; the other the name used by the Mahommedanshachaiza. These names are to this day well known in India; in fact, the latter under the form of haiza is now but too familiar a word in every corner of Hindostan. We thus have at Goa our starting point in the history of Indian cholera, and if we follow it down to its fresh development in 1817, and show that it has all along manifested itself under the same general conditions, we hope that we shall have done more than merely trace out what is historically curious and interesting. We shall help to dissipate the notion which is even in these days the popular one, that cholera was a fresh product of the delta of the Ganges in 1817, and we shall be supplying information of no small importance in its bearing on what has really been the most weighty issue raised at the recent International Conference at Constantinople. Our next account of mordeshin is also from Goa. Linschot, a Dutchman, spent some years in that city, leaving it in 1589, He gives an interesting account of the place, and of India generally; and in his account of the climate and diseases of the coast, he thus expresses himself: 'Les maladies que ces changements de temps apportent aux habitants de Goa sont diverses, entre lesquelles a la vogue celle qu'ils appellent mordexin, qui survient en un instant et à l'improviste avec soulèvement de l'estomac et vomissement continuel jusques à tomber en défaillance; cette maladie est commune et mortifère à plusieurs.' We have next to cross the seas to Java, and find another Dutchman, Bontius, describing the disease as he had seen it in Batavia before the year 1629. Though in his account of the malady he only uses the Latin name for it, luckily in another part of his book he he mentions that hogstone is a cure for cholera, called by the Malays mordeshi. Now we know that the Portuguese were the first Europeans who had settlements in Java, and that they were turned out by the Dutch about thirty years before Bontius wrote. It is therefore tolerably clear that the Indian name-for there is no such Malay word-was introduced by the Portuguese, and that they either applied it to a disease already existing in Java, or to one which they had carried there in their ships from the Malabar coast. In those days the Portuguese were in close communication with Ormuz and the coast of Arabia, and the mouth of the Persian Gulf; and cholera was more likely to be carried that short distance than the longer one to Java; but we have no evidence of cholera having been observed at that time on those coasts. There are, indeed, notices of Portuguese troops being attacked with sudden sickness, but its nature is not specified. Returning to India we find Mandelsloe (not, indeed, much better than a copyist of Linschot), still in 1638 again talking of the mordeshin at Goa as a disease which kills without delay. To him succeeds the Frenchman Thevenot, who travelled all over India, and mentions having had a slight attack of cholera in travelling from Boorhampore to Surat. He takes the opportunity to say that there are four kinds of what the Portuguese call mordeshin, and adds, 'Je crois que cette dernière est le cholera morbus: ceux qui l'ont, souffrent les trois maux ensemble, à savoir le vomissement, le flux de ventre, et les extremes douleurs. Les maladies se font sentir quelquefois avec des douleurs si pressantes, qu'elles tuent un homme en vingt-quatre heures.' About the same time, or 1676, we have Dellon, a prisoner of the Inquisition at Goa, saying that in their confinement they got very fair food, 'pour les garantir du cruel mal que les Indiens appellent mordeshin, laquelle est frequente et dangereuse dans ces climats.' The next notice of the disease is, unfortunately, not so positive and distinct as the preceding ones. A violent epidemic spread through the whole camp of Aurungzebe in 1689, in the neighbourhood of Beejapore, with such fatality that no one reckoned on his existence for a single hour. To this disease the native historians have given the usual name for cholera, although the symptoms which have been mentioned by them resemble rather those of the plague. In favour of its having been cholera may be advanced the statement of Linschot, repeated by Mandelsloe, that plague was unknown in India, that Beejapore is only 120 miles from the coast where we know cholera prevailed at that Vol. 122.-No. 243. D time, time, and the fact that when a disease did appear in India resembling plague, the natives gave it an entirely different name from that of cholera. From this period to our certain record of cholera being at Arcot in 1756, the space is not bridged over by ascertained facts. We have, through Dr. Mason Good, the vague assurance he had received from the India Office that there was evidence of the existence of the disease in India about a hundred years before he wrote, which was in 1826. We attach more credit to a very popular belief among some of the more intelligent natives of the Deccan, that it broke out with frightful severity in a detachment of the invading army of Nadir Shah in 1737, and we have the still more important fact that, when it did appear again, or at least when we hear of it again, it was recognised by its old name of mordeshin. In this absence of definite information regarding cholera in the first half of the eighteenth century, we may conveniently pause, and consider some of its characteristics during the preceding century and a half. We have cholera prevailing as a severe endemic disease in Candeish and on the Malabar coast, and especially at Goa and Surat, the centres of trade; Goa on a soil of laterite, with abundant low marshy land in its neighbourhood, and a place of very considerable native pilgrimage; Goa and Surat both situated on tidal rivers. We have it prevailing most at particular seasons, and therefore we may infer in some degree as an epidemic. an epidemic. We find it carried in ships to Batavia, nearly as great a distance as it has ever been conveyed in that way; for though it has been carried as far as the Mauritius, it has never gone on to the Cape of Good Hope. We find a traveller attacked with it on his journey to Surat, just as a traveller is often seized in these days, and we have its very probable invasion of the army of Aurungzebe. We have also the opinion hazarded that good feeding prevents the disease, which, by the way, in those days was usually attributed to indigestible food. Thus we have all the characteristic habits of the malady clearly indicated on the west coast at a period when we have no notice of it in other parts of India. Cholera, if we except the great city of Bombay, is probably not more prevalent now on the western coast of India than in the days of Portuguese prosperity. Although, according to the most recent information, it at times makes fearful inroads at Calicut, and there have been epidemics in Malabar of great intensity, yet it only occurs occasionally at Surat, Vingorla, Cannanore, Cannanore, and Cochin. Both European and native troops have been of late years at least five times more liable to cholera in the Ceded districts of the comparatively high table-land of the Deccan than on the coasts of Malabar and Canara. The country about Boorampore is still a great seat of cholera. Pursuing the history of cholera, we have now to transfer ourselves from the western to the eastern coast of the great peninsula, from the palm-fringed coast of Malabar, with its luxuriant vegetation and magnificent back-ground of mountains, to the flat, bare, surf-beaten shores of Coromandel; from the haunts of the Portuguese to the Carnatic, where the great struggle was being carried on by the French and English for ascendency. Madras accounts first mention the disease in 1756 at Arcot, about fifty miles inland from the Presidency town. The ailment seems to have adhered to the district for a long time, for in Arcot or in Vellore, or in the adjoining valley of Amburpet, there are frequent notices of it from 1769 to 1783 and 1787. Lind, in his book on the 'Diseases of Seamen,' the first edition of which was published in 1768, talks of the mordeshin as being very frequent and fatal in the East Indies. Dr. Paisley, of Madras, writing in 1774, states, that in the first campaign made in that country it was horribly fatal to the blacks, and that fifty Europeans of the line were seized with it, that it was the same disease which they had seen at Trincomalee. He says it is often epidemic among the blacks, whom it destroys quickly, and he approves of moving a camp to get rid of it. There seems no reason to doubt that cholera reached the Isle of France in 1775. The accounts of this given to our officers at a later period were clear and convincing. Of the ravages of the malady on the Coromandel coast and near the French settlements we have full accounts from Sonnerat for the period of about 1775 to 1780. This writer has got the credit, probably without cause, of having converted mordeshin into the similarly sounding mort de chien! He gives an account of the ravages of more than one epidemic, and says that upwards of sixty thousand people of the country between Caricall, in the delta of the Cauvery, and Pondicherry, were carried off by it. Our next notice of the subject carries us a long way up the coast, to a neighbourhood of which we have not as yet heard, to the delta of the Mahanuddy and to Juggernath in the first place, and to Calcutta and the Gangetic valley in the second.* In 1781, * It would be very important to obtain accounts of cholera epidemics in other parts of India of an earlier date, but none have yet been discovered. Dr. James D 2 Johnson, 1781, a detachment of Bengal troops passing down from Cuttack to Ganjam were suddenly seized with cholera on the 22nd of March, the disease being said to have been previously common among the people of the country. It was entirely new to the Bengal officers, who, in the first place, as has happened in many a plague, attributed it to poison. The seizure was as sudden and as violent as its epidemic visitations ever are in these days. Out of a body of about 5000 men, it is said that 700 died. As the detachment moved on to the south the complaint gradually left it; but the pest was not confined to the country near Ganjam, it travelled up to Calcutta, where, according to Warren Hastings, although recognised as the ailment called mordeshin, it created intense alarm and horror, having caused 879 deaths in ten days; in the month of April it gradually abated, and pursued its course to the northward. Unfortunately its course was not traced, but it can scarcely be doubted that it is the malignant distemper of which Mr. Lindsay, of Sylhet, in the north-east corner of Lower Bengal, writes in the month of September, 1781, that, after having carried off a number of the inhabitants of Calcutta, it is now raging with the greatest fury at Sylhet. Many of the Zemindars and Naibs having fallen victims to it, the others have in a body deserted the town.'* The rumour mentioned by the Bengal Medical Board in 1819, that cholera prevailed in Bundelcund about forty years before, may have been well founded if the disease at this time travelled up the Gangetic valley; and perhaps this would in some measure render its sudden outbreak higher up the Ganges at Hurdwar in the early part of 1783 less surprising. The disease when it left the Bengal detachment on its way south was not exhausted, for it appeared in General Andre's beleaguering army in 1781. We have ample evidence of its presence at Madras in 1782, when it killed fifty Europeans of a regiment within three days of their arrival by sea, and in less than a month a thousand Europeans suffered from attacks of it. In the same year it also prevailed in the fleet off Madras and at Trincomalee; and König, the botanist, who Johnson, indeed, once made a statement before the Westminster Medical Society, that there had been an epidemic in Surat in 1760, which carried off 60,000 people, but it does not appear on what authority this statement rests. A good deal has been made, especially by French writers, of the fact of 30,000 natives and 800 Europeans having been reported to have died of the disease in Bengal in 1762; but Lind, the authority for this, expressly calls the disease a putrid and remitting fever, to be cured by bark. Lind and Bogue both describe the diseases of seamen in the river Hooghly from a period which may be said to extend from 1757 to 1770, but they make no mention of any disease like cholera, and Lind was familiar with the fact of the existence of mordeshin in the South. |