4. Cholera is almost always preceded by a premonitory diarrhoea, which
lasts from one or two to three or four or more days before urgent and
characteristic symptoms show themselves. Of 6,213 cases, no less than
5,786 had preceding diarrhoea. The sufferers from this sow the germs of
the disease in numerous, often distant and obscure, places, to which no
choleraic person is supposed to have come.
5. The discharges swarm with infective bacteria of various kinds, some of
which, especially Koch's comma bacilli, seem to be specific.
6. The disease has been reproduced in men and some few animals by their
swallowing the discharges.
7. The discharges, according to the experiments of Thiersch,
Burdon-Sanderson, and Macnamara, are not virulent and poisonous for the
first twenty-four hours; on the second day eleven per cent. of those who
swallow them will suffer; on the third day, thirty-six per cent.; on the
fourth day, ninety per cent.; on the fifth day, seventy-one per cent.; on
the sixth day, forty per cent.; and after that the discharges have no
effect--the bacteria die, and the poison becomes inert.
Professor Robin reproduced cholera in dogs, and the celebrated dog Juno
died of cholera in Egypt last year.
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