SONTHAL PERGUNNAHS.
41
their clients, and each man is bound to stick to his own clients, and
is not allowed to extend his practice to families in charge of somebody
else.
Consequently when an inoculator finishes vaccinating all the
unprotected children amongst his own clients, he has to wait till he obtains
fresh subjects for operation by fresh additions to their families. For this
reason, as the men who did the greatest amount of work during the past
year are those who also did most work during the year before, they had com-
paratively fewer cases to operate on within their prescribed beats. But this
falling off will afterwards be supplemented by the work of those who have
hitherto kept aloof, and also of those who commenced operations too late in the
season to do much.
Result of inspec-
tion.
7. The result of the operations, from what I have seen by personal
inspection in the neighbourhood of Deoghur, has been on the whole satisfactory.
A decided improvement was noticed in the work of the older hands who have
taken to vaccination for the last two years, but similar results did not attend
the work of some of the new-comers. These men will, however, improve with a
little teaching and further experience.
The experiment of
training inocu-
lators a success
8. From the last and previous years' experience, I am now persuaded
that the experiment of converting Brahmin inoculators into vaccinators has been
a decided success. Not only did the old inoculators come back to me for
permission to resume their work during the year under review, but several new
applicants came to take up vaccination amongst their clients in the districts of
Doomka, Godda, and Pakour, and also in portions of Hazareebaugh, Monghyr,
and Bhaugulpore adjoining the district of Deoghur. I had one inoculator
working in Pakour, two in Godda, and six in Doomka; and amongst these last
six, it may be mentioned as a curious fact, was a Sonthal inoculator, who lives
in the Deoghur district, but who willingly went to work amongst the people
of his race in the distant parts of Doomka. In fact, the report of the success
of the older hands having got abroad, this class of people have become so keen
in taking up this modified form of their old profession, that my trouble now-
a-days has been not so much to persuade them to take up this work, as to have
to adjudicate sometimes between contending parties, who are members of the
same family, as to who has the best claim to vaccinate certain of their family
clients. Even bunniahs and mahajuns came to me all the way from the district
of Monghyr, with contending inoculators belonging to the same family, for
me to decide who had the best right to have them as clients.
9. As the men who were sent to these districts came late, they did not
succeed in doing much. The inoculators in Godda do not appear to have done
much, as no report has been received from them. The one in the Pakour dis-
trict has vaccinated 147 in six villages, and reports have been received from four
out of the six in Doomka about their having vaccinated 610 children in eight
villages.
Summary
of
season's proceed-
ings.
10. Thus I had towards the latter end of the season vaccination work
going on in all the sub-districts in the Sonthal Pergunnahs ; namely, it was
carried on by the Government vaccine staff in the district of Rajmehal, and
in some parts of Pakour ; and by Brahmin inoculators in another part of
Pakour, in Godda, in Doomka, and all over Deoghur, who were all working on
their own account without the expectation of any remuneration from Govern-
ment. These inoculators have all worked under my orders. They were parti-
cular in submitting their periodical reports to me, and many of them in the
neighbourhood, when the work was over, before returning to their respective
homes, came to pay their respects to me and promised to return early next season.
Difficulty in sup-
plying crusts.
11. The only difficulty I had to meet in the year's operations was to keep
the inoculators well supplied with vaccine crusts, which did retard the progress
of the work to some extent. Their clients object to the use of lymph in hermeti-
cally sealed tubes ; arm to arm vaccination is not permitted, and they have
not yet succeeded in collecting their own crusts. So that I had to keep them
11