Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1881-04-26
ESTABLISHED 1850.
THE BLACK DEATH.
The Plague I'm the East and Its For.
mer Ravages.

A dispatch from Constantinople says
that the plague has appeared at Kufa,
ninety 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 NAV
spread westward. 1t therefore becomes
important to know the characteristics of
the disease. The London Standard states
on pathological grounds that it is ''a
very malignant form of contagious
fever" which breaks out suddenly in
certain localities aud spreads with fright
ful rapidity, and that the present type"
is as virulent as that of the Middle Ages.
1t is characterized by swellings of the
lymphatic glands and by carbuncles,
and beyond doubt one seizure seems
to afford no security against a second
attack.
This is, however, a point upon which
physicians have not often had chance
of studying, since ''the pest" does not
usually leave the same individual a
chance of experiencing its symptoms
twice. 1t has been contended that it is
not contagious, but in almost every case
of an outbreak the disease has been
traced to persons who have come from
infected districts. In the Astrakhan
epidemic of 1879, and in that of III,
which cut off 100, 900 people in Moscow,
the pestilence was known to have been
brought, in the one instance, from Cen
trail Asia, and in the other from Choczin.
Again, during the latter outbreak the
], 400 inmates of the Imperial Found
ling Hospital, who were isolated, and in
1913 the town of Jegla, in Malta, which
was shut off from Valetta, where the dis
ease was raging, entirely escaped.
Quarantine, however, as a 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 barrier against
the plague.
No other form of death has ever en-.
listed into its service historians of such
brilliant talent. De Foe could not have
been an eyewitness of the horrible
scenes of 1865 in London. But lie had
doubtless talked to many who had sur
yived 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 London deserted by the
court, and indeed all who could escape
into the country In "RienzI" Lord
Litton has given an account scarcely less
pictorial of the plague in Florence, and
III almost every other European country
'the pest which crept like foul miasma
over Asia, Northern Africa and Europe,
from Naples to Archangel, and even to
distant Greenland, where it smote the
Esquimaux by thousands, has secured
such able chroniclers that at the slightest
sign of its return Western Europe natur-
ally grows alarmed.
In the years 1348, 1861, 1868, 1869 and
1902 London was visited by the "black
death, !" though these early attacks of the
diseases sink into insignificance when
compared with that which desolated the
city in 1865, the year which will ever be
known as 1.-THE year of the plague" In
reality, however, though it caused be
fore Christmas mortality of 68, 500 out
OF the half million people which this
metropolis then contained, it did not
abate until 1866, while in the thirteen
subsequent years there were many fatal
cases recorded. But after 1879 no death
from plague is known to have occurred,
and IN 1904 so entirely had it disap
peared that the name of the disease was
actually omitted from the bills of NOR
tality.