The Causes of Cholera Panic.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 68, 20 September 1884, Page 5

The Causes of Cholera Panic.

It is extraordinarily difficult to understand fully the feeling created in Southern Europe by any alarm of cholera. It is not confined to Frenchmen, as some imagine— though Frenchmen make panic most visible by its contrast with their usual courage— but is manifested in at least an equal degree by Spaniards and Italians, and even Southern Germans and Slavs. These races are not only brave, but they show themselves under certain circumstances less sensitive to the fear of death or illness than the peoples of the north. Their doctors and engineers and deputies are nearly as well acquainted with the laws of hygiene as our own ; but it is almost impossible to induce them to take the permanent sanitary precautions which to Englishmen seem so indispensable. They will not make the arrangements for sewage which Englishmen hold so necessary, and which they have contended for successfully in all the places they visit ; and they will for years tolerate water so impure and cesspools so visibly dangerous that Londoners, rather than bear them, would upset a Government. They will not enforce stern rules of cleanlinees, even when uncleanliness involves liability to typhus— that is, to rapid death. Part of this negligence is no doubt due to ignorance, but part also to an habitual indifference, and a little-talked-of but muchfelt fatalism which ought to be permament protections against panic, and in the East are so. No possible outburst of a disease could stir Mussulmans, or Hindoos, or Chinese into the panic exhibited recently by a family in Marseilles named Lenfl6 who, losing one of their number by cholera, fled the city without burying the dead and without the slightest attempt to protect the considerable property lying in his room. Hindoos in particular show a sabmissiveness to diseaso as part of the will of God, which is at once the despair and the admiration of the doctors, and is in the most direct and wonderful contrast to their usual timidity. We should have said, however, that Mersoillaise, and Neapolitans, and the people of Barcelona feared death habitually less than Englishmen ; yet the moment there is an alarm of cholera all those people seem to lose their reason. Their impulse is to fly in vast crowds, and it is obeyed. Toulon has been emptied like a city threatened with destruction ; the rich in Mnrsoilles arc flying to the mountains, and in northern Spain it is said " the cholera," which has not appeared, suspends business, depresses the funds, and forms the sole subject of conversation. No measure of prevention is considered too cruel ; and men who live by visitors vote eagerly for precautions which no visitors not driven by necessity will encounter. Who is going to the Pyrenees to be stripped and sponged with disinfectants, before obtaining permission to quit the railway station ? Even the claims of professional honour give way to an unreasoning fear, and its asserted gravely, we hope falsely, that in Marseilles doctors are reluctant to volunteer for the hospitals ; that compulsion is used to obtain carriers for the dead ; and that the police are with the utmost difficulty kept together. Nothing of this kind has ever been seen in London, though there have been discreditable cases in bad districts; and the Europeans of India, who are never free from the liability to the scourge, face it as they faco sunstroke —as a most disagreeable but unavoidable incident of daily life. The work must be done, and it is done. Yet the latter arc, as a rule, a comfort-loving class, and aie peculiarly well aware of the awful rapidity with which cholera, in its earlier outbursts, before its poisonouo energy has partially expended itself, slays its victims. The main cause of the difference— apart from the dii Terence in his attitude towards religion — is, we (" Spectator ") conceive, thesegregativeness of the Englishman, the disposition he has cultivated in himself to be himself, and not yield to the contagion of emotion. He likes a separate compartment even when he is frightened. He is himself by himself there in his separate house, and is not a member of a crowd, talking, exaggerating, communicating fear by contact and unreasoning discussion. We all know how a crowd can cower, and shriek, and fly, though each individual is braye — remember the scene in the King Theatre of Vienna some years ago— and in these southern cities everyone is a unit in a crowd, accustomed to a gregarious out ofdoor life, habituated to respect neighbours' opinions, untaught to consider that he must, as a self-respecting human being, be in all matters not settled by law his own guide and master. He has sought help from his fellows, from their ideas, their sympathy on certain subjects, all his life ; and when they get frightened he gets frightened too, with a fright which, like that of a crowd in a theatre on fire, shortly develops into a mania of selfish panic. In that horrible scene, the burning of the great theatre of Vienna, only one man retained reason enough to remember that the hot smoke which was choking all around must, by the law of its being, rise. He threw himself under the benches, ordered his sister to lie down too, and both were saved. The re3t flung themselves, like wild animals in terror, into passages already blocked by impassable heaps of dead. The Marseillaise or Neapolitan lives always in a theatre, and, like the member of a packed audience, is always liable to be carried away by the contagion - the actual contagion, foritisthat —of any great emotion, fear, of course, being the most strong. Panic, in such circumstances frequently partakes so closely of the character of insanity, that even in the condemnation which is essential to society some pity should mingle.