PLAGUE IN INDIA.« 



By Charles Ceeighton, jNI. D.6 



Eifjht years ago the subject of plague in India was brought before 

 this society in a paper by Mr. Herbert Birdwood, which dealt with 

 the first epidemic in Bombay city in 1896-97 (Journal, February 

 28, 189, vol. xLvi, p. 305). Mr. Birdwood's intimate account of 

 the beginnings of the infection, of its rapid extension, and of the 

 efforts made to cope with it w411 remain a document of importance, 

 both by reason of the fresh impression of so novel an experience in 

 an Indian city under British rule and also because it was the first 

 chapter of what is likely to prove a long history. At the date of the 

 paper a second plague season in Bombay had begun, which j^roved 

 to be more disastrous than the first; the cities of Poona and Karachi 

 were also infected severely, and there were many minor centers 

 along the whole coast northward to Cutch, and in the transmontane 

 districts of Satara and Sholapur to the south, as well as two small 

 spots of plague more than a thousand miles away in the northwest — 

 one around Hurdwar and the other in villages of the Jullundur 

 doab. By that time the government of India was naturally alarmed 

 at a threatened invasion of the whole country, and appointed, in 

 August, 1898, a commission of five to conduct an investigation spec- 

 ially defined as of a scientific character, into origins and ways of 

 spreading, as well as into the mode of treatment by serum inocula- 

 tion and the mode of prevention by inoculating a solution of dead 

 bacteria. That commission is now ancient history, so that I am at 

 liberty to remark that there was not a single epidemiologist upon it, 

 and that its " scientific character " was ruined by two causes — first, 

 because the two medical members Avho Avrote the report put aside 

 such evidence as did not come within their bacteriological point of 

 view, and, secondly, because the two departmental members were 



« Reprinted by permission, with author's corrections, from Journal of the 

 Society of Arts. London, Vol. LIII, No. 2T4.S, Friday, June 16, 1905. Read 

 before the Indian section of the Society of Arts on May 18, 1905. 



^Author of a History of Epidemics in Britain. 



309 



