If cholera resisted all these precautions, and became fatal in the terrific way it had done in other countries, the authorities announced "that it might become necessary to draw a strong body of troops or police round the affected places." This proclamation of the physicians of 1831 was published throughout the land in the form of an Order of the King in Council. It might have been more to the purpose to have cleansed the affected town. "But," says Mr Howell,[9] "the strong good sense of the public averted many of the mischiefs which these scientific advisers would have produced had their counsels been carried into execution. The preventive measures, which were eventually adopted by them, consisted in prohibiting intercourse between one town and another by sea, and permitting it by land: thus communication between London and Edinburgh by stage-coach was perfectly free and uninterrupted, while communication between those capitals by sea was prohibited with such rigour that no interest, however powerful, could procure an exemption! Francis Jeffrey--at this time holding the high office of Lord Advocate of Scotland, and whose influence from his personal and official connections was very great--was unable to obtain permission for his faithful servant, in the last stage of dropsy, to go from London to Leith by water, lest he should carry with him to his native country by that mode of conveyance, not the dropsy which he had, but the cholera which he had not. "'You will be sorry,' writes Jeffrey to Miss Cockburn, 'to hear that poor old Fergus is so ill that I fear he will die very soon. I have made great efforts to get him shipped off to Scotland, where he wishes much to go; but the _quarantine regulations are so absurdly severe that, in spite of all my influence with the Privy Council, I have not been able to get a passage for him, and he is quite unable to travel by land_.... He has decided water in the chest and swelling in all his limbs. The doctors say he may die any day, and that it is scarcely possible he can recover.'"[10] Mr Howell adds that these examples are not adduced for the purpose of casting obloquy on the eminent physicians of that day, who vainly endeavoured to reduce to practice in the nineteenth century the standard, but obsolete, doctrines taught almost universally in the medical schools, but solely for the purpose of displaying the state of the science of Public Health in the year 1831-32, as far as the physicians of highest reputation and largest practice may be taken as its exponents. It need hardly be said that it is with this purpose only that these facts are again cited here. Footnote 4: _Children of this marriage_: Herman Southwood Smith, born 1819, died 1897; Spencer, Christina, both died in childhood. Footnote 5: Westminster Review, 1825, p. 519. Footnote 6: Longmans, 1830. Footnote 7: Treatise on Fever, p. 324. Footnote 8: