Invisible to the Naked Eye

Cleanliness . . . and an early application of medicine and medical skill . . . were supposed to be specifics against the contagion. And to a certain extent there is some truth in these views; and i t is thus that God enforces on us, by his great and invariable laws of health, the necessity of attention to these sanitary measures. But, pushing that truth too fix, men began to map out the geographical boundaries of the malady. . . . Then the selfishness of our nature, leaving the poor in their disease or in their danger to pay the penalty of their localities, was heard to congratulate itself on the comparative safety of its better situations. . . . And then it was . . . that the cholera at one leap passed from the squalid abodes of poverty into the houses which were re.joicing in their comforts, and the streets which were high and clean. -Rev. Henry Venn Elliott, "Two Sermons on the Hundred and First and Sixty-Second Psalms as Applicable to the Harvest, the Cholera, and the War"