THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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was the man who lived, and not that the cholera was killed.” Prevention is the only cure. Epidemics are nature’s health officers, and they do their work efficiently if they are sufficiently serious to impress themselves upon the public mind. Slowly and by degrees, as malarial and deadly spots in India are drained and sanitated, the outbreaks of cholera are fewer and less serious. Disease is a foe that recedes as the missionaries of health advance. Gradually, as more light is thrown on the science of hygiene, the legions of microbes ever lurking in darkness and dirt are stifled in their growth and become weaker and weaker. The insanitation of India, the starvation and misery of Russia, are a standing menace to the peoples of Europe, and so long as these exist, each year we will have to gird up our strength to meet the foe, and shall have to grapple hard to keep him to his own quarters—the quarters of dirt and uncivilization.
In these days of express speed we have many advantages. The railroad and steamboat bring us into relation with the uttermost ends of the earth and the peoples thereof, but we must not lose sight of the fact that at the same time we are brought into contact with the moral and physical diseases of all these different peoples.
The “ sins of Hamburg ” were great, and eventually found her out. Nature had dealt very gently with her breaches of the eternal laws of health. Thirteen comparatively mild epidemics had failed to suggest to the city authorities the necessity of putting their house in order. The Elbe water was still supplied in all its native and imported impurity, and then came the fourteenth warning, sadder, sharper and effectual/and Hamburg has risen to the occasion. From her commercial position and harbor accommodations Hamburg is peculiarly open to the importation of foreign diseases, and it is only by keeping her hearths well garnished and the city household in health that she can afford to admit suspicious visitors. It is a matter of menace and regret that she did not enforce compulsory cremation during the cholera epidemic. A beautiful crematorium, hitherto practically unused, stood all through the epidemic as a silent but eloquent monument to the prejudices of the people. In certain conditions of the soil a cholera body is more dangerous to the community when below than when above the ground, and it is much to be feared that a heavy day of reckoning must come when it is remembered that countless thousands of cholera corpses are giving their noxious emanations to the atmosphere of Hamburg.
A physician, recently writing in a professional paper, makes use of the following astonishing statement that “cholera gives a new lease of life to the sufferer.” This may be so if he means us to understand some transcendental lease in another sphere, but if he alludes to a lease here below, I cannot but think that the most of us should object to the terms of the agreement. There is no question but that, in the marvelous cleaning up of Europe that has followed the cholera scare, there will be found new leases of life to whole nations consequent to improved health conditions. Let me commend the system to Chicago. In my stay here during the World’s Fair I have noted whole rows of “ cholera streets,” which have not even the excuse of being artistic.
Tracts were distributed broadcast among the patients in the German hospitals persuading them in solemn language that the cholera epidemic was a merciful dispensation on the part of a wise Providence, and that the gentle chastisement had been sent as a reminder that their ways of life were evil. But not a word was said of the evil ways of the authorities of the city, who allowed the water supply to become so polluted that “ death in the cup ” might be taken more as a statement of fact than as a poetical exaggeration.
In conclusion let me offer a deserved tribute to the energy, the self-denial and devotion of Hamburg and her sons and daughters during the period of suffering. Nurses, physicians and attendants worked with a singleness of purpose and forgetfulness of self. Much illness arose and many deaths occurred in the ranks, but all stood by their guns with a courage that was one of the most hopeful beacons at a time when encouraging signals were much needed.
Truly “unhappy Hamburg” has been the scapegoat for sanitary sins. She was