through that district, 1143 were in a few days sent into hospital, whilst “death raged in the camp with
a
horror not to be described.” The earliest account from the pen of an English physician is by D
r. Paisley,
and is dated Madras, Feby. 1774. In 1783 it broke out at Hardwar Fair, and is said, in less than 8 days, to have carried off 20,000 pilgrims. The paucity of cases of cholera among European troops in the returns up to 1817, is ascribed by Dr. Macnamara to the way in which facts were disguised by the current nomenclature of disease. It need not perhaps be denied that the outbreak of 1817 marked a great recrudescence of the disease. But it is a fact that some of the more terrible features of the epidemic, which are then
spoken of as quite new, had been prominently described at Goa nearly three centuries before.
See on
this subject an article by Dr. J. Macpherson in Quarterly Review, for Jany. 1867, and a Treatise on
Asiatic Cholera, by C. Macnamara, 1876. To these, and especially to the former, we owe several facts
and references; though we had recorded quotations relating to mordexin and its identity with cholera
some years before even the earlier of these publications.