Origin of the Cholera

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 12, 1865

Origin of the Cholera.

The President of the General Sanitary Department for Egypt has submitted a report to the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs, in which he attributes the periodical return of the cholera and of other destructive epidemics that have sacrificed many million victims in thickly peopled Europe, to the wretched custom of pilgrimage to the holy cities of the Mohammedans. He states that from 700,000 to 800,000 pilgrims annually assemble in the holy city, large numbers of whom fall victims to the deadly climate and their unreasonable and filthy manner of life. The dead are not regularly interred, but are hastily shuffled under the desert sand, and their bodies being soon uncovered, of course infect the air, while the decomposition of the skin, blood, bones, and offal of perhaps 2,000,000 sheep offered in sacrifice, adds to the deadly miasma. It is not strange that the cholera broke out so violently the past season from such a center of decomposing matter, and that within a fortnight 100,000 pilgrims died. He asks in his memorial, "Can Europe ever be regarded as secure from the cholera or any other disease which may follow, just as cholera has followed plague, so long as this barbarous practice of pilgrimage to Mecca is not abolished, or at least kept within reasonable bounds?"

The cholera is making progress westward, being on the increase in France, and having appeared in England. While it was prevailing in Constantinople, the American missionaries devoted themselves with great success to the sick among the poor. The mortality of those under their treatment did not exceed five per cent., while the average mortality in the city was about sixty-five per cent.