5
there is any really scientific distinction between these processes, is for medical
experts to say : but there can be no doubt that the Thána plague entered every
place by the agency of persons, clothes or rats which had become infected else-
where. The various facts detailed below are marshalled to prove this, for it
appears to me that unless the history of the present epidemic establishes the two
facts that the plague can be carried from place to place, and that unless so
carried it will not arise in any place, the time spent in writing this report will
have been thrown away.
13. I am indebted to Surgeon-Major A. Y. Anderson, the Deputy Sanitary
Commissioner of the Western Registration Circle, for a series of briet' but valu-
able reports on the introduction of the plague into each of the principal places in
the district except Kalyán. I forward these reports in original, but extract the
leading facts in the following paragraphs. I take the places in the order in
which I have entered them in the table in paragraph 11 above.
Kalyán Municipality : Po-
pulation 11,685.
14. Kalyán.—The report for this town has been written by Assistant
Surgeon R. R. Dadina, the official Vice-President of
the Municipality. About 1,500 persons flying from
Bombay to escape the plague took up their residence
in Kalyán, and many of them continued to go in and out of Bombay daily in
pursuit of their avocations. The first recorded case of plague in the town was
that of a Bania from Mándvi who arrived in Kalyán on October 6th, and was
discovered to have plague on the 8th. Between that date and the 28th February
following, twenty other imported cases were discovered at various times either on
the station or in the town, but owing to the extreme vigilance of Dr. Dadina and
the segregation and disinfection which he strictly enforced in the face of much
murmuring and some Municipal opposition, the disease got little opportunity to
spread and no local resident was at first affected. The first resident affected was
a ward-boy of the plague hospital, who caught the disease on the 1st March.
This was obviously from his contact with the sick. The next local case occurred
on the 16th March in the person of a Brahmin boy, son of a Sub-Overseer at
Bhiwndi, where the plague was then raging. The boy must have got the plague
either through his father, who used to go to Bhiwndi daily, or from contagion
which was then being spread in his street—the Cloth Bazaar—by diseased rats.
The Cloth Bazaar was one of the streets to which the fugitives from Bombay had
mostly gone to reside, and most of the imported cases had occurred there.
Early in March the rats began to die in the houses of this street ; and on the 20th
March three local cases were reported from houses where rats had died. The
number soon increased to six, and then the Vice-Président turned out all the
residents of the street and disinfected the houses with streams of carbolic solu-
tion through the fire-engine. This of course stopped the plague there ; the
only other case in it being one of a person who had remained concealed in a
back-room when the others left. The case of this street is evidently one where
infected matter from imported cases, which had escaped notice when the patients
were segregated, had infected rats, and these in their turn infected the residents.
From time to time between April 16th, the date of the last case in the Cloth
Bazaar, and the 30th June local cases occurred here and there in the
town ; the total number from first to last being 29. The Mahomedan commu-
nity which forms a large proportion of the population of Kalyán had hardly any
cases, which I attribute to the fact that the Mahomedans of Bombay did not fly
much from the plague, and the Banias and Lohanas who brought it into Kalyán
had little to do with the Mahomedans there. The case of Kalyán is a striking
instance of how a place may be kept nearly unharmed by plague by extreme
vigilance, although situated on the very high road of infection (between Bombay
and Bhiwndi) and destitute of all the elements of European sanitation. Any
person who alleges that plague springs naturally from dirt or grain will have to
explain (1) how it was that it did not attack any local resident of Kalyán until
21 cases had been imported into the town, and rats had begun to die in the street
to which the imported cases mostly came, (2) why the first batch of local cases
was in that locality, and (3) why the merest handful were attacked out of the
thousands who lived in the same conditions of dirt and food. The percentage
of local cases on the normal population of Kalyán was only 0.2. The theory that
B 833—2