14
THE ASIATIC EPIDEMIC OF 1817-21.
isolated case, no particular notice was taken of it. About the lltli pf Jnlj we hear of the simultaneous outbreak of cholera in the districts of Patna, My- mensing, and Sylhet;* the former situated to the extreme west, and the latter to the east of the Province of Bengal. In August and the following months Calcutta was affected, 25,000 of its inhabitants having been under medical treatment for the disease. Of these 4000 died; but it is worthy of notice that scarcely a case of cholera occurred among several thousand prisoners conjfined in the AUipore Jail.
Copies of some of the original reports, from which these details have been compiled, are still preserved among the MS. Proceedings of the Bengal Medical Board, and are well worth studying {vide Appendix A) ; but they do not appear among the Office records in the order above indicated, no special reports on cholera having been called for or received by the Board until the end of the year.
The Proceedings of the Medical Board, to which I shall so frequently have to refer in this volume, consist of a series of day books in which entries have been made regarding the current work of the Office from the year 1800 to 1842. These records, therefore, are par- ticularly valuable in tracing the history of a disease such as we are now considering, because they give us the opinions entertained by the members of the Board at the'time the events brought to their notice actually occurred, — ideas which might very probably have un- dergone considerable modification if recorded at a subsequent period, and reviewed by the light of further
- ' Report on the Epidemic Cliolera Morbus as it visited the territories
subject to the Presidency of Bengal in 1817, 1818, 1819.' By J. Jameson. Calcutta, 1820, p. 5.
