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and its neighbourhood in the Surat District; and the fifth, Surgeon-Captain
Anderson, was similarly employed in the highly infected villages in the south
of Sálsette Island in the Thána District. It became necessary therefore to
find other plague-inspecting officers for Sind as well as the Presidency proper.
For Sind the officers selected were Surgeon-Major R:Baker, I. M. S., and
Surgeon-Captain Borradaile, A. M. S., and for the Presidency proper three
officers were appointed, viz., Surgeon-Major A. W. Street, I. M. S., D.S.O., who
had charge of the railway inspection measures, and Dr. Lowson and Surgeon-
Major W. Reade, A. M. S., whose duty it was to visit highly infected places,
advise the local officers and report to Government the results of their inspec-
tion. The inspecting plague officers in Sind were placed directly under the Com-
missioner, and those in the Presidency proper directly under Government.
5. Government having arranged to confer sufficient legal powers on their offi-
cers and to give them full advice and instruction as to the methods to be adopted,
it only remained to provide further officers and funds. The want of medical officers
of all grades had been felt from the beginning : but additional officers were obtain-
ed from time to time from the Government of India, leave was stopped and officers
were recalled from leave, and twelve nurses were sent out by the Secretary of
State. As regards funds, Government promptly made advances of money from
time to time by telegram to all officers who required it—a course rendered
necessary by the impecunious condition to which many local bodies had been
reduced.
SECTION 2.—Camps of Observation.
1. Abundant evidence was received at an early stage that plague was being
spread by the movement of the people. It was found impossible to arrange for
widespread medical inspection of so thorough a character as of itself to be
sufficient to check the spread, and further measures for the detention under
observation of suspected persons, in which class almost all persons coming
from a highly infected area might be included, were found necessary in
several parts of the Presidency proper and Sind. In outlying villages in
the mofussil, the residents were encouraged to keep strangers from infected
places out of their village sites—a practice which they are in the habit of
adopting for self-protection in the case of cholera epidemics ; but in certain
areas further measures of the nature of modified land quarantine were adopted
by the authorities, in exercise of the powers conferred on 'them under the
Epidemic Diseases Act, to (1) prohibit communication between one place and
another and (2) impose quarantine at one place against another. As has already
been mentioned at the end of Section 1 of Chapter III, Part I, the rules confer-
ring these powers were considered objectionable by the Government of India, and
in lieu of them a new rule empowering plague authorities to detain suspected
persons under observation was eventually issued on the 15th June. The
quarantine arrangements previously in force, however, had not gone beyond
the detention of suspicious persons under observation. The power to impose
quarantine was .exercised by District Magistrates in numerous places in the
Presidency. When plague was recognized to be severely epidemic in the city of
Poona, people began to leave that city for other cities in the Deccan in large
numbers. To check the immigration and to prevent the introduction of the
disease by persons in whose systems the disease was incubating, the Collector
of Sholápur, the district through which the G. I. P. Railway runs after
leaving Poona, as early as the 12th February imposed quarantine at the Sholápur
Railway station and supplemented it a few days later by quarantine at the
stations of Bársi Road and Mohol. Camps of observation were established at
these places, but at the latter, though a camp was at first considered desirable
for the purpose of checking the rush of people to the Pandharpur fair, it was
subsequently abolished and arrivals at Mohol were conveyed to the camp at
Bársi Road. Certain persons were exempted from residence at the camps on
their giving satisfactory assurances that they would remain in their houses
for eight days, during which daily inquiries would be made regarding their state
of health. Suitable sanitary arrangements were made at the camps ; a Hospital
Assistant was deputed to each of them in addition to the Assistant Collector in