The approach of the Cholera seems to have infused into
the in- habitants of Vienna, as well as their master, a degree of panic which is hardly more tolerable than the horrors of the disease that has excited it. The following account of the preparations for the expected visit of Death is given in a private letter.
" The approach of the Cholera has filled every mind with alarm. The public has given itself up so entirely to dread, that already several per- sons have died with fright or become mad. All communication with Hungary, that rich and fertile country, from whence the capital derives almost all its provisions, has ceased, and the price of every article is aug- mented. The city, with its suburbs, is divided into fifty districts; each district has four physicians. A commissary is appointed to every four houses, who is bound to visit them daily in order to prevent more than three persons from sleeping in the same room. In our house every cham- ber is furnished with a quantity of chlorate of lime, and fumigated every day with vinegar. It is recommended that the mouth should be washed every morning with vinegar, and that a drop of essence of camomile on a piece of sugar should be taken fasting. Every house must be supplied with a quantity of vinegar, herbs, tea, flannel, and heated sand. The Emperor has given 2,000,000 florins towards the establishment of hospi- tals, to which purpose some of the most extensive houses and the theatre have been appropriated. They have been put under the superintendence of a physician who has been practising at Warsaw. All the citizens have been learning the manual exercise, in order to do the duty of the city, the troops not being more than sufficient for the cordons. No one is al- lowed to go three leagues from the capital, without being furnished with a certificate of health. At the same time, carriages are seen setting off in crowds for Switzerland and the Tyrol. In the Churches, the Cholera is the great object of the prayers of all. On the 16th, all the theatres will be shut. Trade and manufactures are at an end, and the workmen are without bread. All foreigners will be obliged to quit the town in eight days, if they are without employment. The country-people are employed by the Emperor in cutting a canal. The Emperor is going with the court to Schoenbrun, the outside walls and windows of which are closed with planks. The front part of the garden is being cleared, in order to receive a regiment of grenadiers and four batteries of artillery. Belvidere and the Castle of Schwartzenberg are also being fortified in the same manner.
A Daily Paper terms these melancholy details ; melancholy de- tails, indeed, of poor human nature, which is thus content to give up life for the sake of living. It is good, while the Emperor FRAN- CIS is shutting up his windows with planks—lest Death should slip into the royal chambers, like Uriel on a sun-beam—to inquire into the opinions and feelings of those who have experienced those horrors, the bare contemplation of which is so awful to the not- easily excited imaginations of the Vienese. The following may be
looked on as a non-medical report of the disease, as it showed itself at Riga ; where, of all places yet visited, its ravages have been most terrible.
" The fact of non-contagion seems determined, as far as a question can be so which must rest solely upon negative evidence. The strongest pos- sible proof is, the circumstance that not one of the persons employed in removing the dead bodies (which is done without any precaution) has been taken ill. The statement of fifteen labourers being attacked while opening a pack of hemp, is a notorious falsehood. Some physicians in- cline to the opinion that the disease may sometimes be caught by infec- tion, where the habit of body of the individual is predisposed to receive it; the majority of the faculty, however, maintain a contrary doctrine, and the result of the hospital practice is in their favour. There are se- venty-eight persons employed in the principal hospital here : of these only two have been attacked, one of whom was an Inspecteur de Salle, and not in immediate attendance upon the sick. On the other hand, in private families several instances have occurred where the illness of one individual has been followed by that of others; but, generally, only where the first case has proved fatal, and the survivors have given way to grief and alarm. Mercenary attendants have seldom been attacked; and, as mental agitation is proved to be one of the principal agents in propagating or generating the disease, these isolated cases are attributed to that cause rather than to infection.
" It is impossible to trace the origin of the disease to the ships ; indeed it had not manifested itself at the places from whence they come, till after it had broken out here : the nearest point infected was Schowlen, a dis- tance of 200 versts (150 miles); and it appeared simultaneously in three different places in Riga, without touching the interjacent country. The first cases were two stone-masons, working in the Petersburg suburbs, a person in the citadel, and a lady resident in the town ; none of these persons had had the slightest communication with the crews of vessels, or other strangers ; and the quarter inhabited by people of that &scrip-. tion was later attacked, though it has ultimately suffered most."
This, like all the statements that reach us, seems more and more to confirm our first view of the subject, that cholera is not contagious nor infectious, and that the idea of its communication by a bale of goods from one country to another is an old woman's fable. In the mean time, there is no question of its progress' westward, whether we choose to attribute its diffusion to genera causes which affect the whole atmosphere, or to the cloud of pes- tilence that hovers over the filthy and famishing bands of NICHO- LAS. We shall, in all probability, hear of it next in the neigh- bourhood of Berlin. Little did Kosciusno dream, when brooding over the wrongs of his country, that her avenger lay hid, against the fulness of time, in the reeds of the Ganges. Let us hope, that the cool villanies of Prussia and Austria, and the wanton outrages of Russia, will be sufficiently atoned for by the punishment of the guilty trio ; and that the Rhine will stay the plague.
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