The Middlebury register and Addison County journal. [volume] (Middlebury, Vt.) 1883-1885, 1885-07-03
THE CHOLERA SCOURGE.
of the Dreaded Disease
Throughout Spain.
The Death Rate Likely to Become
Terribly Large,

AT n time Of the year when the cholera had
only taken a few scores of lives i'm Toulon
and its suburbs and had just made its appear
ance in Marseiiles i'll 1884, there have been
1920 deaths, reported from eight provinces
of Spain, which is more than half the entire
nunber of deaths in all Of France last wear.
From the start, says n London dispatch, the
rate of mortality in Spain has been far greater
than it was in France, and ~latterly it has be-
come greater han it was last year even in
Naples, The average ratio of deaths to cases
now is about four in nine throughout Spain.
Roughly speaking, the death ratio was two
in seven in France last year and three in seven
in Italy. Within the last week, and notably
has this been the case in Murcia, more than
half the people attacked have died, and in
the new provinces where the pest has ap-
peared within the last few days escapes have
been the exception.
All the features of last years siege, either
essential or eccentric-and who shall say in
this strange disease which is which-are being
repeated. The fearful experience at the AK
madhouse finds its parallel in an asylum out
side of Madrid, where the ~lunatics are dying
like sheep in a murrain. The peculiar
susceptibility of young soldiers to cholera,
which was noted at Toulon and in
Campobasso last year, has been exemplified
again at the Toledo barracks. The deaths
among the sisters of charity, now as then, are
almost wholly confined to peasant women in
the less exclusive orders like the Augustine
ians. The plague finds ninety-nine in a hun
dred of its victims i'll the slums or poor vii
lagos, where hygiene is an unknown word.
A wine merchant who had Just arrived in
London from Murcia tells Inc that it is abso-
lutely impossible to describe the national
panic, loss of nerve and reason, and the frenzy
of local uunrantinns NOT only hoc tlie f,,I
ing of panic paralyzed the business of Spain,
but it threatens to work mora evil by derang-
ing the food supply that even the cholera has
worked or may yet work.
1t is interesting here to note, in considering
the theory that the spread of the disease is con.
nected closely with the water, that Murcia
and Valencia are the most plentifully irri-
gated districts in the south OF Europe. The
system of supply dates from the time of
the Moorish occupation of Spain,
and for scientific utilization the water
supply there is still unrivaled in
the whole world. The city of Murcia is not
so desperate a SUM as it formerly was, since.
after the great flood DESTROYED the lower
part of the town, it was rebuilt with more
regard to sanitation. But the people are dis
tlnctly OF the lowest type, mental and physi-
cal, in Spain. But here as at
Valencia the city is surrounded by a
perfect network of crowded hamlets.
constituting one vast tropical garden, irri-
gated by a system which permits not a drop
of water to reach the sea-a system which is
most marvellous from the engineering point
of view, but is simply murderous now when
the summer sun makes every trench a dis
penser of the plague and of death. Refugees
from the cities were quick to spread the dis
ease through these villages: now, more slow
ly, but none the less surely, they are dissent
mating it throughout the peninsula.
When we consider the total mortality at
this early date, 1T is frightful to contemplate
what the total for Spain may be, and almost
surely will be, during the four or five torrid
to come, to say nothing of the proba-
bllity, nay, almost certainty, of the speedy
of the plague i'll other southern
lands.