114
Cholera may be re-
garded as an imported
disease on the Neil-
gherries.
132. In all these twelve years the only really serious importation of cholera
to the hills was due to the attack of a number of the Native
Christian residents, who had visited the low country in 1866,
and contracted cholera at a religious festival in the Ooimba-
tore District. These people, returning to the hills in considerable numbers,
brought up the contagium of the disease in such bulk as to be the cause
of cholera in a few persons who had never left the hills. In only one case
is there any history of cholera " originating" on the hills—the case of the
prisoner in the Ootacamund Jail, alluded to by Dr. .Mackay. In this case
the only evidence of personal communication with the low country was the
fact of the food and clothing used by the jail prisoners coming from the plains.
A single case of this kind, in which the disease might possibly have been con-
veyed by the food or clothing, or in which the choleraic symptoms might have
been due to other causes than malignant cholera, can be of no weight in an
argument that cholera contagium is "air-conveyed," in the face of the strong
testimony afforded by numerous other instances, that the disease appeared only
in those who had been exposed to risk in the low country, or who had been
in communication with affected persons.
133. It is quite certain, I think, from the experience of 1866, that if the Neil-
gherry Hill stations were often visited by crowds of Hindu pilgrims, the locality
would not escape cholera as it now does. The Hills owe their immunity, so far
as it is possible to judge, to the fact that the air, soil, and water of this elevated
region are not often subject to the reception of cholera contagium, and possibly,
in some degree, to the circumstance, that the contagium received by importation
from below, is incapable of surviving in the conditions of air, soil, and water
peculiar to the hills.
The actual position of the lower street of the bazaar at Ootacamund, in
regard to the lake, and the sub-soil water underlying the sites of the houses, is
such that I should never be surprised to hear that an introduced cholera had
temporarily taken up its abode there.
Improvements in the water-supply, drainage, and conservancy of the hill
sanitaria are in progress, and with due attention to these, cholera may, I
think, be always kept from extending in our Southern Hill Stations.
Typhoid fever com-
mon at Neilgherry
Stations.
134. While all the facts point to the conclusion that cholera does not find a
congenial borne on the Neilgherry or Shervaroy Hills, I may
here observe that genuine typhoid or enteric fever has been
by no means uncommon in the former locality, and that
within my own personal knowledge, during the last ten years there have been
three distinct outbreaks of it at the stations of Wellington and Ootacamund.
CHOLERA IN THE MADRAS DISTRICT AND PRESIDENCY TOWN.
Little Mount festival.
135. In the month of January 1870, cholera was still lingering about Madras
and Conjeeveram Towns, and in a few villages of the district,
but it gradually died out before April. In April there was an
appearance of cholera amongst some of the Native Catholic Christians of
Madras, who seem to have acquired the disease at the " Little Mount Feast,"