Page:A treatise on Asiatic cholera.djvu/28

From the returns kept in the Office of the Bengal Medical Board during the early part of the present century, and which relate exclusively to the European troops, I find that in 1808 five cases of cholera are reported,—one at Meerut, one at Delhij another at Muttra, and two in Calcutta. In 1809 three cases occurred, and in 1811, 1812, 1813 no less than seventy-nine cases of cholera are reported as having taken place at Chunar, but not a single one from any other station in the Presidency. During the year 1814 instances of cholera occurred at Cawnpore, Nagpoor, Benares, Meerut, and Dinapore; in all forty-six cases, and eleven deaths. These are the first deaths reported from this disease among our European troops in Bengal. In 1815 and 1816 there were no cases of cholera; and in this Presidency only two instances occurred among the troops at Benares in 1817, although the disease was raging throughout the whole of Bengal, showing that statistics, drawn simply from the condition of our European troops, are hardly to be relied upon as a criterion of the prevalence of cholera in India.

The disease appeared in a crowded barrack in Fort William, in 1814, among recruits just arrived from England;^[1] and in an epidemic form at Jaulna during the same year. With regard to this latter outbreak, Dr. Cruickshanks subsequently explained (in 1831) that "he entered these cases in the Hospital Returns as bowel complaint in 1814, because the matter ejected by vomiting and stool was of an aqueous or mucilaginous consistency, containing no bile." Mr. Scott