Morris tribune. [volume] (Morris, Minn.) 1880-2000, 1881-04-07
THE Black Death"


London cable to the New York Herald: A
despatch from Constantinople says that the
plague has appeared at Kufa, ninty miles south
of Bagdad, and that the mortality in Nedjib is
increasing. Already Europe is becoming
alarmed at the appearance of the pest in the
East, and fears are expressed that it may
sprea d westward. 1t therefore becomes I'M
portant to know the characteristics of the dis
ease. The London Standard states on patho
logical grounds that it is q every malignant
form of contagious fever" which breaks out
frightful rapidity, and the present "type" is
characterized by swellings Of the Emphatic
glands and by oarbuncles, and beyond doubt
one seizure seems to afford no security against
q second attack. This is, however, point up
on which physicians have not often had
chance Of studying, since "the pest" does not
usually leave the same individual q chance of
exr eriencing its symptoms twice. 1t has been
commended that it is not contagious, but In al
most every case of an outbreak the disease has
been traced to persons who have come from
infected districts. In the Astrakhan epidemic
100000 people in Moscow, the pestilence was
known to have been brought, in the one in
stance, from Central Asia, and in the other
from Chozin. Again, during the latter out.
break the l 400 inmates Of the Imperial
Founding hospital, who were isolated. and in
1918, the town of Jegla, in Malta, which was
shut of from Valetta. where the disease was
raging, entirely escaped. Quarantine, how
ever, as q preventive against the ravages of
cholera, has been proved to be utterly futile,
and it is very generally allowed that it is not
much more potent as q barrier against tn Q
plague No other form of death has ever enc
listed into its service historians of such bril-
liant talent De Foe could not have been an eye
witness of the horrible scenes of 1865 in Lon
don. But he had doubtless talked to many who
had survived those dreadful times and were
familiar with the tales of the corpse-carrying
wagon going Its dismal rounds, of the living
being unable to carry out the dead, and Of Lon
don deserted by the court, and, indeed, all who
could escape into the country In Rienzi
the late Lord Lytton has given an account
scarcely less pictorial Of the plague in Florence
and in almost every European country 1.-THE
pest which crept like q foul miasma over
Asia, Northern Africa and Europe from Naples
to Archangel, and even to distant Greenland,
has secured such able chroniclers that, at the
slightest sign of its reappearance western Eu-
rope naturally grows alarmed. In the years
134S. 1881, 1858, 1869, and 1902 London
was visited by the "black death, though these
early attacks Of the disease sink into iDsignif-
canoe when compared with that which desola-
ted the city in 1865, the year which will ever
be known as 'the year of the plague" In re-
atty, however, though 1t caused before Christ
mas mortality of 68, 800 out Of the half
million people which the metropolis then con-
tanned. it did not abate until 1865, while ia the
thirteen subsequent years there were many IA
tai case recorded. But after 1879 no death
from plague is known to have occurred, and in
1904 so entirely had it disappeared that the
name Of the disease was actually omitted from
the bills of mortality.