34
Every day the returns of deaths from the various cemeteries are
sorted out in the Health Office, according to the districts in which the
deceased resided ; it will, however, be apparent that it was not sufficient for
the Plague Staff merely to pick out the plague cases and visit and deal with
the houses named. The hospital assistant or other official at the cemetery
is not invariably a man whose diagnosis could be entirely relied upon
even if he had had every opportunityof treating and watching the course
of the disease while the patient still lived ; his difficulties in arriving at a
correct conclusion are practically insurmountable when he has to rely
upon the statements of persons generally ignorant, and almost always free
from the rudiments of medical knowledge, whose intelligence moreover is
devoted towards creating the belief that the death has been due to any
other cause but plague. In short the diagnosis of the disease at the
cemetery cannot be trusted, nor in times of plague can the addresses
from which bodies are brought as supplied from the cemeteries be relied
upon. Here again the cemetery officials are entirely dependent upon the
information supplied by members of the funeral party. Often in pure
ignorance, oftener with the deliberate object of evading the plague adminis-
tration, they give entirely wrong addresses, and at the beginning of the
present year the percentage of deaths which the administration were un-
able to trace in the city from the information supplied by the cemeteries
was about 20.
To meet these difficulties two measures were introduced. The sec-
tional Medical Officers employed in the city were held responsible to visit
every house where a death occurred and by the strictest possible enquiry
ascertain whether there was any suspicion that the death was due to
plague ; if there was, disinfection and such other measures as were deemed
necessary were adopted. At the same time to facilitate their discovery of
the houses where deaths had occurred the services of the police were en-
listed : and in this matter the co-operation of Mr. R. H. Vincent, C. I. E.,
late Police Commissioner, was of very great value. Seventeen recording
stations were constituted in different parts of the city, to each of which two
superior police officers were attached for day and night duty. The police
in the city had instructions to note all deaths that might occur and to
report them without delay at the nearest recording station ; the infor-
mation was then noted down by the Recording Officer and arrangements
were made to pass it on without delay to the District Officer concerned.
This system was introduced towards the end of August, when the in-
creasing mortality gave grave cause for anxiety. It worked well at the
outset, but it did not overcome the desire of the people to conceal the ad-
dress where a man had died of plague 5 they were clever enough to evade
the police in many cases, and the sepoys themselves, who had little
inducement to show smartness in this extra and alien duty, soon show-
ed a tendency to become slack, and as regards deaths which they
failed to register the difficulties of the Plague Staff were just as bad
as before. The proportion of deaths untraceable had fallen from 20
to 10 per cent., but with a rising mortality in January, and every pro-