“The present received opinion,” Johnson wrote, “is that this species of Catarrh [influenza] arises from contagion, which possibly may be true; yet to my mind it appears no easy matter to conceive how the disease can spread so far and wide in so short a space of time as we perceive it does, or how it can affect persons many miles apart, at the same time, where there had been no previous direct or indirect intercourse—if propagated only by a matter arising from the body of a man laboring under it.”
