The recent outbreak of cholera in the south of Italy
and Sicily has been marked by some most disheartening circumstances. Italians, brave enough under other circumstances, seem to go mad with fear of epidemics, and the doctors, of all men, are menaced by the populace with massacre, not because they cannot cure cholera, which would be intelligible, but because they are be- lieved to produce it by poisoning the wells. In many places the doctors were compelled to fly on the first outburst, and the authorities were at their wits' end for sextons to bury the dead. They were at last compelled to employ the soldiery as sextons, nurses, and carriers of the sick, and the men did the duty admir- ably, a curious proof of the power of discipline, or, as Carlyle calls it, "rhythmic drill." The excessive cowardice of Italians in the face of cholera is shared by the French, and is nearly inexplicable. It is not a southern defect, for Mohammedans never show it ; and it is not a result of creed, for Irish face disease almost as readily as death; and it can hardly be a defect in the national character, or the soldiers would not behave so admirably. We suspect it is the result of an excessive fear of pain peculiar to mobile, sensitive, and, as it were, artist organizations.
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