When cholera broke out across all continents in the 19th century, millions were left dead in the wake of a horrible pandemic. At that time nobody knew that contaminated water could lead to such horrible plagues with the victims dying in just a few hours from continual diarrhea and vomiting. Again, God raised up a Christian from Scotland to find a cure.
Thomas Latta (1790s-1833) grew up in the seaside village of Newhaven, near Edinburgh, and the family were members of the Presbyterian Associate Congregation of Leith. Graduating in medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1819, Latta practiced as a doctor in both Leith and Edinburgh. In 1831 the cholera plague had spread to Britain, killing many thousands, and the medical scientists did not know how to combat it. Latta observed that the victims lost copious amounts of fluids before they died and he realised that water, with a small amount of salt, had to be injected into the body to prevent dehydration and replace a key depleted mineral. The idea was not entirely new, as Dr William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, an Irishman who had graduated at the University of Edinburgh and who had worked with William Alison in a practice in the same city, had already experimented with an intravenous solution in dogs. However, Latta, convinced that the principle would work for humans, applied a saline solution into the bloodstream of a woman in the Edinburgh Cholera Hospital on Drummond St, where the Old Surgeon’s Hall used to be. The result in 1832 was stunning:
“She had apparently reached the last moments of her earthly existence, and now nothing could injure her,” he wrote. “Indeed, so entirely was she reduced that I feared I should be unable to get my apparatus ready ere she expired. Having inserted a tube into the basilic vein, cautiously—anxiously, I watched the effect; ounce after ounce was injected, but no visible change was produced. Still persevering I thought she began to breathe less laboriously; soon her sharpened features and sunken eye and fallen jaw, pale and cold, bearing the manifest impress of death’s signet, began to glow with returning animation; the pulse which had ceased returned to the wrist, at first small and quick, by degrees it became more and more distinct, fuller, slower and firmer, and in the short space of half an hour when six pints had been injected she expressed in a firm voice that she was free from all uneasiness . . . her features bore the aspect of comfort and health. This being my first case, I fancied my patient secure and from my great need of a little repose left her in charge of the hospital surgeon.”
Unfortunately, with the saline drip treatment finished too early the woman died within a few hours, but the breakthrough for cholera had begun. Latta published his results in the journal, Lancet, on 23 June 1832, much to the excitement of the medical world. The saline drip method would be developed and effectively used throughout the world by 1902, bringing a cure to millions suffering with cholera, with about 99% of patients being saved. It has been so effective that it is regularly used in hospital wards for those who need. It would take the combined work of the medical doctor John Snow, and the Revd Henry Whitehead in London a few decades later, to prove that the cause of cholera was contaminated water, rather than the speculated miasma, or polluted air, leading to council improvements to prevent outbreaks of this terrible plague.
“Heal the sick…” (Matthew 10:8, NKJV).
Image: https://intermountainhealthcare.org/news/2022/06/intermountain-researchers-finds-better-and-safer-treatment-option-than-saline-solution/