Was It in the Air? The Killers Too Small to See
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Cholera is caused by a poison that multiplies inside its victims, leaves them in their waste, and spreads when others swallow it, mostly in water fouled by sewage. “For the morbid matter of cholera having the property of reproducing its own kind, must necessarily have some sort of structure, most likely that of a cell.”
I drank a culture of the cholera germ and got nothing worse than diarrhea. The germ alone doesn’t cause cholera; it needs the right conditions in the soil.
Not everyone who swallows a germ falls ill, as with any infection. One man’s mild illness doesn’t show that the germ needs anything more.
In Hamburg’s epidemic, the town of Altona next door was largely spared, on the same soil and under the same sky. Only its water differs: Altona filters it. The germ in the water decides it, not the soil.
The cause of cholera is a comma-shaped bacterium, which I found in 1883 and 1884 in the intestines of its victims.