The intelligence from the district infected by the cholera, is this week of a far more alarming character than at any former period. At Sunderland, the cholera appears to have nearly run its course; but at Newcastle it continues its ravages with unabated force; and in Gateshead, which is a suburb of Newcastle, separated from it by the river Tyne, as Salford is from Manchester by the Irwell, the accounts are of the most formidable nature. The disease seems to have made its first appearance there on Christmas day, when there were 39 cases and nine deaths reported, a commencement which, formidable as it appears, was not so appalling as the progress on the following day, when there appear to have been 76 new cases and 41 deaths.
A letter to the editor of the London Courier says: "It is difficult to assign any probable reason for this sudden and frightful development of the disorder. Gateshead had been clear of it for seventeen or eighteen days longer than Newcastle, during which time the winds prevailed from the southward. On Saturday the wind shifted to the north – blowing direct from Newcastle to Gateshead; and on Sunday the disease was found raging in every quarter of the town, though attacking scarcely any but the poorer classes of the people. Though the disease is clearly epidemical, there can be no doubt whatever of its being also contagious, and a prevailing idea is that the danger of infection is infinitely increased by coming within the sphere of the effluvia of the dead."
NORTH SHIELDS.
We have been favoured with the following extract of a letter from a most respectable resident at North Shields, containing some particulars which will be interesting to our readers:
"North Shields, Dec. 25. 1831.
"By means of Irish vagrants from Sunderland, the cholera has been twice brought amongst us. The first suspicious case occurred at a lodging-house in the Half Moon Bank. A man called Mallan, a rambling Irish cobbler, had attended his father at Sunderland, who died of cholera, had assisted in laying out the body, and attending to the last offices; concluding in the Irish fashion by a regular row, getting drunk, and lying great part of the night in the street. This man, coming to Shields immediately afterwards, took ill, and in a short time fell a victim to his folly. Another Irish vagrant, who has a lodging at the head of Toll-street, went over to Sunderland to collect rags and beg. He returned home to his wife and four children drunk, and after abusing his wife shamefully, was taken ill of cholera. Several medical men were called in, and succeeded in arresting the progress of the disease; but in three days afterwards, his wife, a stout, healthy woman, who had attended on him during his illness, was attacked by the disease, and died in about fifteen hours. A poor woman had been got to attend upon her and the children about half an hour before she died, and every precaution adopted that the medical men could think of; but the husband had secreted a bundle of his rags under his bed, and on the nurse going out for a short time on Monday last, he had crawled out of bed, sorted his rags on the floor, and sent one of his children to sell them in the town. The nurse, on her return, found the effluvia so noisome that she directly took ill, and died in about eight hours. Infection or contagion seems to be established beyond doubt. All the medical men here who have seen the disease describe it as entirely different to any thing they have met with before."
