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their re-appearance at the north end of the District during the cold
weather, and a considerable mortality among them both in the north and
south at the beginning of December, i.e., just when the mortality began
to rise in those directions.
He-infection.
In B Ward South (Mandvi and Chakla), where the houses are for
the most part fairly good, plague seemed at first to spread slowly from
one man to another, the epidemic only becoming severe when the rats
became badly infected and carried the disease into almost every house,
but, speaking generally, plague attached itself to insanitary localities, and
only after they had become thoroughly poisoned did the better class
dwellings in the neighbourhood suffer. This feature of plague, which it
doubtless shares with most other epidemic diseases, has been noticed in
past years, and it was observed that localities, and even particular
houses, which were badly affected in previous epidemics, were more liable
to re-infection during the year under report.
The history of a plague epidemic naturally tends to become a Lis-
tory of insanitary areas—the out-break of plague in them, and the
attempts made to free them from infection. The methods adopted were,
briefly, removal of the sick to hospital, and of the healthy to camps, and
the disinfection of the infected place. It can hardly be doubted that, if it
were possible to simultaneously evacuate the whole or large portions of
Bombay, and to keep the people in camp till rats had ceased to die and
their houses had been disinfected, the back of an epidemic would be at
once broken, though plague might linger on and break out again in a
subsequent year.
But any thing approaching evacuation on a sufficiently large scale is out
of the question in Bombay, and the result was, and always has been, that
though the temporary evacuation of a bad locality has stopped the epide-
mic there for the time being, and saved thousands of lives, these insanitary
places are always liable to re-infection so long as the disease is prevalent.
It may be brought in by rats, or by a man who has visited a sick friend,
or in numberless other ways : and once it has obtained a fresh footing,
the same conditions of filth and overcrowding, and of want of light and
ventilation, help and foster it till the place once more becomes a plague
centre. It thus frequently happened that neighbourhoods suffering from
these defects were seriously infected more than once during the epidemic.
Facts of this kind are the weapons of those who urge that plague measures
are useless, and therefore intolerable. The lives that are lost arrest
the attention: no allowance is made for the lives that are saved.
The classes
most liable to
.Plague.
The people who suffered most were those who lived among the
most insanitary surroundings, in other words the poorer classes. Capt.
Pritchard writes :—
" Their habits are often dirty and unclean, even the food they eat and their
" manner of eating. The ordinary duties which nature necessarily imposes upon all
" alike are executed by them often in the very room in which they sleep and eat, and
" almost as much of this is done inside as outside, to a distance of within a few paces
" of the house."