190
STATISTICS OF THE JAIL POPULATION OF BENGAL FROM 1859 TO 1876.
[ Section III.
wanted to adhere to those prescribed for ordinary fever, such as they had hitherto been accu
s-tomed to."
Captain Browne continues :—" Their own medicines failed, and death was rapid and certain.
Whole families were cut off, and villages nearly depopulated. Young and old alike suffered, and
as the sufferers (although ailing for days) were probably only confined to their houses for two
days before death, the usual report of the disease from the villages was, that the fever attacked
a person one day, and he died the following day."
And the distinction in season is thus drawn :—" This epidemic lasted with force until 1st
November, and from that period, as the cold weather set in, its violence abated and it gradually
disappeared."
The fever was not confined to any particular class :—" It was most fatal among the
poorer classes, those who were ill-fed and badly housed. The higher classes did not escape, but
the disease did not visit them so frequently, and their better habits of life rendered them more
able to withstand the advances of the attack."
Again we have this epidemic linked on geographically with the fever of the Mirzapore Dis-
trict through the Native States intervening. It appeared also
in Punnah, and in the Native States adjoining. Its presence
as an epidemic is traced also in Dumoh, in Chandeyree, in Nursingpore, in Bhopal, and in por-
- t i o n s o f S c i n d i a h ' s t e r r i t o r i e s . A n d t h e n a t i v e c a r r i e r s i n f o r m e d C a p t a i n B r o w n e t h a t , t a k i n g
Saugor as a centre, it raged for 100 miles all around.
As in the Valley of the Ganges, the oldest inhabitants said that they never remembered
such a disease before. The loss of the Saugor District is estimated at 23,000, a vast number of
whom were cultivators, who, from being exposed in their fields to alternate wet and intense heat,
appeared peculiarly liable to the fever.
The same phenomenon found in Behar and Benares held good here. The jail population who
of all others most ready to succumb to typhus, escaped altogether,
from being confined within walls and being shut up at night.
T h e u n i v e r s a l i t y o f t h e f e v e r w a s a l s o n o t e d . T h e D e p u t y C o m m i s s i o n e r s a y s : — " I f o u n d
that it had equally ravaged the closely-inhabited villages and the small hamlets situated in
most salubrious localities. In November, when I commenced my annual tour, I visited many of
the villages in which the fever was still thinning the population. The people were cast down
and disheartened to a degree ; and they told me that they had even been obliged to dispense
with the usual ceremony of burning their dead, as there was no one who would fetch wood for
the pyres, owing either to sickness or terror."
And all of this mortal sickness from Rajshahye to Bhopal, was
compressed into a few weeks ; for even in the South the deadly
manifestation of this fever did not commence until late in the
rains of 1859.
For the area of the epidemic of 1859 I cannot give numerical results. What epidemic
malaria implies may, however, be inferred from the loss of a province in a succeeding epidemic.
In the Punjab in 1860 and 1870, more than half a million of the inhabitants were carried off
in the two years :—
186
Jan.
Feb. March.
April. May. June. July. August. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.
For the year.
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
11,582
15,807 24,010 56,623 59,917 35,180
272,946
1870
23,396 16,148 15,854 14,561 18,267 15,885 13,784
15,595 31,307 44,221 36,332 29,793
275,093
548,039
The epidemic malaria of 1859 was cut short in its westward advance. The limiting line is
that defined on our cholera map of 1868, which corresponds
almost exactly with Jameson's record of the distribution of
epidemic cholera up to the end of 1817.* In 1860, also, the
advance of the fever epidemic was up to a definite line, the
same which marked out the famine area of 1860-61, and up to which also the cholera of 1860
moved and found its further progress stopped.
It has been suggested that the importation of some portion of the fever-stricken population
of Central India introduced the source of the relapsing typhus which appeared in the jails of
the North-Western Provinces in November 1859. The jails affected were all beyond the
geographical limit of the malaria epidemic. Many no doubt did receive prisoners from affected
districts ; but against this supposition there stands the fact, that, in the spring of 1859, I can
trace contagious fever in several of the jails of the North-West within which relapsing fever
became epidemic on the setting in of the cold season of 1859-60.
Thus eight fever deaths occurred at Meerut in May and June 1859, which 1 take to be the
first, indication of the commencement of the great mortality which continued till June 1862.
And in the Budaon Jail the mortality from yellow fever from March to July ran as under, surely
harking the fact that the fever was of the typhus group :—
March.
April.
May.
June.
July.
1
2
7
4
. . .
This contagions fever of May and June 1859 could have had no connection with the fevers
of Central India, whether contagious or malarious.
*The cholera of October 1877, which extended from the Ganges to Western Malwa, had a geography very similar ;
differing in this, that, as in 1863, Agra and Muttra were within the northern limiting line.
In the Nerbudda Valley.
Comparative immunity of the
jails of all districts affected.
Loss of the population during an
epidemic of malarious fever : Punjab,
1869-70.
Epidemic malaria of 1859 geogra
-phically limited in the west. The
jails affected by relapsing fever were
beyond this limit.