A Cholera Panic | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 22, 1865

A Cholera Panic.

ThE cholera is on its travels—that fierce and pitiless plague, which has its residence in the east but sallies forth at periodical intervals to decimate west, north and south. From time to time we hear of the visitation in distant places—deaths by wholesale in Central Asia, deaths in Southern Russia, regiments disbanded by death on Indian marches, and rivers choked with corpses in the islands of the Eastern Ocean. The last Red Sea news brought word that Mecca and Medina are this year vast lazar houses of cholera-smitten victims, the pilgrims perishing all along the road to the shrines from Jeddah and the southern ports, and sheiks who had come to kiss the kaaba turning back in horror, with their trains, to succumb in tents and houses where they had shut themselves up. Already Egypt has been reached, and the fellahs there are perishing by the thousands; so much so that the Italian and French harbors are shut against vessels from Alexandria. Marseilles has kept all the mail boats in quarantine ever since two moribund passengers were landed at Joliette; and at last we ourselves have been obliged to confront a peril that cannot be disregarded. The newspapers and letters which went out of the general post-office on Tuesday, were sent in boxes instead of bags, to prevent infections being carried out of Egypt by the mail passing through the country. That, indeed, is not a precaution on our own behalf, but it will be observed with regard to the overland dispatches coming homeward. All the instances we enumerate, and others which might be cited, prove that the cholera is on its periodical march; and, without ascribing to the same source the outbreaks in North Russia, Poland and Prussia, it is at least possible that the year may be signalized by the invasion of that enemy which patriotism and courage cannot keep out of our island.—English paper.