Excerpt from War, Cholera, and the Ministry of Health: An Appeal to Sir Benjamin Hall
Sir, and my Countrymen,
1. Public casualties open the world"s heart and eyes, insure the progress of decent fairness, bring mankind to books, to facts, and to its Maker, and clear away at a heavy, although at the least cost, the obstructions which detain us from better days. The measure of the evil to be got rid of, is given in the weight and stripes of the rod that is used. The present rod is pestilence, the number of whose lashes is not yet complete. For what crime, or for what purpose, is the infliction laid on?
2. There cannot be a doubt that sin is the effectual caller of all misery, and that the cholera is a consequence of our sins. These sins however are of many kinds, and it is not about those which have a simply religious bearing that I am going to speak. Physical and medical sins, acknowledged as such in the sight of God also, are those which I shall try to bring home to you, in order that their special repentance, and a regeneration thereafter, may be insured. Other repentances are urged by other appointed voices, and to them also let us respond, Amen.
3. The British nation, like every other in Christendom, contains within it many solid and compact organizations which have come from old times, and which have well nigh all power in several great departments of action and thought. Among these are the professions, medical, clerical, legal, and many others. Huge social fortresses, they stand above the interests of individual houses, nominally for protection and defence. Yet there is not one of them but supports a continual siege against its own times and peoples; and what is termed reform is always accompanied by the razing of some part of their outworks, or of the very citadels themselves. Each fortalice is taken up by turns, and becomes the subject of an indispensable providential assault; the immediate cause of which is some calamity, or hard necessity which identifies these towers of the past with our straightness, our evils, and our sins; and preaches a brave, God-fearing self-reliance, and a fresh appeal to the sword of our spirits in the great Battle of Facts. The medical profession, with its black, innumerable dungeons, is at present brought, by the benignant pestilence, into clear opposition with the interests of man; and it is to summon you into the ranks of the human powers arrayed against it, that my duty now takes up its otherwise unwilling pen.
4. The medical profession, as such, is confessedly powerless in the presence of cholera. Medical science itself has the disease in its most virulent form. Not a remedy keeps upon its irritable stomach from day to day. There is no power of holding anything healing, but the whole Pharmacop?ia rushes with noisome velocity through this miserable art.
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