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necessary between them and the District Officer, it was not found
possible to devise any form of ticket which would indicate to the
cemetery authorities the locality from which a body was brought ;
an incorrect or false address might still be given them by the funeral
party, and the unfortunate sectional medical officer in some other part
of the city might upon the information from the cemetery trudge all over
his section in search of a death, which had already been registered by
the police in the section to which it properly belonged, and had already
been traced and dealt with by the medical officer there.
A further scheme has, therefore, been recently introduced. The
assistance of the police has been dispensed with and a body of some 200
registration ramosees has been engaged. They have been assigned beats
throughout the city, and one man is always on duty on every beat.
They can all read and write, and instead of merely tickets they issue to
the funeral parties certificates showing from what house they come, so that
there is little room for mistake at the cemeteries. The men are directly
under the control of the various district officers, who should have no
difficulty in keeping them up to the mark ; and as they write the
certificates themselves in foil and counterfoil the necessity for recording
officers disappears. The scheme is in its infancy, and it has not been
possible to exercise much selection in gathering this uniformed corps of
ramosees, but if it is carefully worked there is every reason to hope it
will prove successful. In connection with this subject Rao Bahadur
Narayen Trimbak Vaidya rendered special and very valuable assistance.
By the above means the proportion of undiscovered plague cases has
been considerably reduced. There were of course a number of cases
where the enquiries of the sectional medical officers could elicit no
satisfactory information as to the cause of death. The relatives would
vehemently deny that it was plague, but the rapidity of the disease, the
symptoms described or other circumstances often left the sectional
medical officer in grave doubt. Such cases were classed and dealt with
as suspicious, and though, except in one or two cases, the measures of
segregation of the family or vacation of the house were not adopted,
disinfection was in all but a few instances rigorously carried out in
suspicious cases. In the central district where the discovery of plague
presents more difficulty than anywhere else in Bombay, the treatment of
suspicious deaths received special attention from Sirdar Mahomed Yakub.
He pointed out to the principal Jamayets the necessity of strict enquiry
into the cause of death, and they agreed that unless a medical certificate
was forthcoming, or sickness reported beforehand and the patient examin-
ed before death by the sectional medical officer, or unless there was clear
and undeniable proof of the cause of death, the accounts of friends and
relatives should not be accepted, but the death should be treated as
suspicious. At first frequent objection was taken to the disinfection
which followed this classification of a death, but the support of the
Jamayets and the assistance of the headmen gradually led to its being