212
[CHAP. VIII.
fresh infection from the town ; they died of poison originally carried out by themselves
or their relatives when the town was evacuated.
B.—Eut as regards five other people, their infection has, I think, been derived
from the town since the people went out. I mentioned last week a man who had died
of plague, the father of a whitewasher, who had also died of plague. That man's wife
(the mother of the whitewasher) has in the week under report died of plague (developed
like her husband's when under segregation). Another whitewasher has caught it.
A sweeper woman, who was assisting in cleaning the town, has caught it. A man, who
was helping the merchants tο take their goods out of their shops to the new bazaar
organized in the fields, caught it. A Pardesi policeman, employed on duty at night in
thé town, caught it : possibly from lying down to sleep in some empty house.
Again, of the Pujáris that I had allowed to remain in the town to do the worship
at the temples, the son and nephew of one caught it : but that it was from living in the
town—not from rubbing shoulders with some infected worshipper—I cannot say.
[Their developing it explained how the kunbi boy I mentioned last week as working
for a Brahmin, caught it : he was the Pujári's servant.]
Under the same head might perhaps be put—
(1) A Mahárin, who used to sell grass by the roadside near a heap of gunny bags
lately removed from the town and put in the open to be disinfected by the sun.
(2) A Teli girl, who died suddenly : cause unknown, but put down as plague
because her grandfather had recently had fever of some sort and died.
Neither case was clear, as the grandfather was an old man, and she did not
come to Jalgaon till after his death. But if it was plague they died of, then the
infection may possibly have come from some Teli who has got permission to go into
the town for some hours in the day to work his oil-mill. [This is now being stopped,
and oil-mills removed outside the town.]
C—.A twelfth case was that of a very poor man, practically a beggar : a man
who used to scrape up from the ground (for food) the grains that fell at the Wánis'
shops as the corn was being measured. A man who lives in this way may contract
the infection at any place any time.
D.—The thirteenth and fourteenth cases were a cloth-packer in the weaving mill,
and a Kunbi in a threshing floor close to the town. How they got the infection I have
not been able to trace.
The fifteenth case was that of a clerk in the Post Office. But though we have
counted it as plague, and segregated him and the establishment, and moved the office
to another building, I cannot help thinking that it is only malaria : as last month the
man was in the extremely feverish climate of the Nawápur Peta.
The plague would appear to have now left the Márwádis and to be leaving the
Wánis and Pardesis—the three classes who suffered so severely from it at first. The
people attacked in the week under report included Mussalmáns, Bráhmins, a Kunbi, a
Marátha, a Weaver, a Mahárin, a Jain Shimpi, a Teli, a Sweeper : so that it cannot be
to have gone into any said one particular class. Nor has it gone into any one parti-
cular part of the fields."
The disinfection of the whole town with perchloride of mercury having been completed
during this week, the coolies from Bombay were sent back there.
On the 1st of March 1898, plague appeared at Pilkhod (Chálisgaon Táluka). Pilk-
hod had, owing to some suspicious deaths, been previously evacuated in January : but,
owing to a violent storm, it was soon after re-occupied. "It is impossible," writes the
Collector, " to say where the infection came from." On the 4th of March 1898, two fresh
villages—Málpimpri and Samrod (population, 1,000) (both in the Jámner Táluka)—were
attacked ; but the source of infection could not be discovered.