The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1874-12-05 00:00:00

A WORD TO THE UNWISE.

"WHATEVER is, is right," the Poet said
Bat to vain Penmen, whom he holds in dread,
Who plague him sore to print what they indite,
Punch would say this, "Whatever 'Us, (hat write !"
—Punch.

PLAGUE AND TYPHUS.

Science has had a fresh martyr of no mean type in
Dr. Laval, a surgeon-major in the French Army, who I,
literally laid down his life in the attempt to grapple
with the late visitation of plague in Tunis, and track it
to its true source. At the time of the outbreak in the
Province of Bengazi (according to an interesting
memoir contributed to the Gazette Medicate d'Orient
by Dr. Marroin), Surgeon-Major Laval had left Con-
stantine, his station in Algeria. on leave obtained for
the purposeof conducting botanical researches in Tunis. i
But having once resolved to study the origin and
progress of the epidemic —the news of which reached
him suddenly while thus engaged—he never relaxed ,
the sat-imposed task, and, though ho fell a victim
to his generous enthusiasm, he has left such a monu-
ment as probably would have best pleased himself in
a complete set of notes and a diary, showing that be
had perfectly mastered all the facts within his reach.
As in a simultaneous invasion of the same dreaded
enemy on the Persian borders, the plague had been
preceded in the province of Tunis it visited by a local
famine, which reduced the Bedouin population to the
greatest privations. When Dr. Laval, moved to his
new enterprise, arrived on the 7th of June at Merdsch,
reported as the first focus of the malady, he found
that three nearest tribes had lived for months on wild
vegetables, with a very scanty supply of barleymeal,
and in fact, had been all but starved. While in this
condition of suffering a boy had been seized in one
of their encampments in April with an illness which
esr,isd "IT ee the Oft h ,t&r. snd as hey.-nil
doubt genuine plague. His father was the next victim;
midst, it spread on through the tribe, who assured Dr.
Laval they bail had no previous communication with
any other. It must have passed from them, tin
doubtedly, to the village of Merdsch itself, which lay
not quite a mile off. There had been no death for
several months in this place until the let of June, when
the first case of plague in it proved fatal, and was fol-
lowed by a number of others with alarming rapidity.
When Dr. Laval arrived on the 7th there were fifteen
patients to be treated out of a population of not over
200 persons. The symptoms were invariably the same,
and the typical boils present in all cases, whether of
death or recovery. For &fortnight the French surgeon
struggled on manfully with his work, attended all the
sick, and employed all such disinfecting precautions
as he found possible. But on the 21st he succumbed
to an attack, and on the 27th was dead, though not
without leaving behind him records the most complete
ever hitherto obtained of a number of cases properly
observed, and thus sufficiently giving proof of his o vn
patient heroism. It may be added that the theory
that the plague is in its origin simply a very bad form
of typhus, usually following famine, and aggravated
by want of sanitary precautions, may be said to have
gained strong additional corrolinntion from the results
of Dr. Laval's self-sacrifice. —Pail Stall Gazate.