Word: cholera
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cholera, furiously fatal intestinal disease, is as old as populated India; and until 1817 never left the home grounds. In that year it spread East; with the increase of travel in later years it spread West, invading the Americas in 1826 and 1873. The great pandemic of 1879 to 1883 threw a scare into the civilized world, sent scientists to microscope and test tube, sent Robert Koch* into Egypt from which he emerged with the Vibrio cholerae, cause of all the trouble. Work on the troublesome organism has not ceased since that time. During the last epidemic the British Government...
With characteristic biologic modesty, the cholera bacteriophage had been at work long before it was discovered and named. There have always been cholera patients who recovered spontaneously; many a village in India has remained free from cholera while the epidemic raged around it. These patients had an abundance of bacteriophages in the intestines, probably because the village drinking water had been accidentally contaminated by the bacteriophages. Dr. d'Herelle systematized these coincidences. He prepared cultures of the bacteriophage from the stools of convalescent patients, transferred 30 to 40 cubic centimetres of the culture to every well in the district...
...Cholera. A severe epidemic of cholera was reported from the region of Nanking, where most of the fighting was centred. Bodies were said to be piled high along the banks of the Yangtze, hundreds of corpses floating down the great river...
Twenty-five years ago this array was otherwise. Tuberculosis then was the chief cause of death. But doctors have taught defense against contaminated surroundings. People have learned to guard themselves. So typhoid, yellow and scarlet fevers, diphtheria, cholera and babies' bowel troubles are no longer pandemic and rarely epidemic in civilized countries. People live, on the average, ten years longer now than they...
...skyscraper has already become a plague that we may well range alongside our ancient city scourges of cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis and slums...