312 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



Gujranwala 80,000 last year, and 45,000 the year before, while the old- 

 est centers of infection in the Punjab, the adjacent districts of Jnl- 

 liinder and Hoshiarpur have shown a steady increase for three years 

 running-, reaching last year to oO,000 plague deaths in the one and 

 '25,000 in the other, with the promise of quite as many this season 

 when the returns are completed. For a single week last year in the 

 end of April or the beginning of May, which is the height of the 

 plague season in the Punjab, four of the districts returned 4,000 each, 

 while half a dozen more returned from 2,000 to 3,000. In the United 

 Provinces until this year no district has come near to those enormous 

 weekly maxima ; but at length Muttra has reached 4,000 })lague 

 deaths in a week, while (ihazipur and Agra have each had a highest 

 weekly total of about 1,000. In Behar the worst district has been 

 Saran, the poorest and most crowded part of India, which has 

 reached 2,000 a week, while two or three other districts of the same 

 Patna division have had each over 1,000 a week at the height of the 

 plague season. Last j'ear the plague deaths in all India totaled over 

 a million, of which nearly 400,000 came from the villages of the 

 Punjab and 300,000 from the villages of the B<)m1)ay Presidency. 

 Last year the worst week was that ending the 2d of April, with a 

 total of 40,320 plague deaths. This year the week ending the 1st of 

 April had a total of 57,702, the increase being more than accounted 

 for by the unusual severity of the infection in certain districts of tlie 

 Agra Province, and in the adjoining districts of the Delhi division of 

 the Punjab, as well as by the extension of area eastward in Behar. 



PLAGUE AN OLD AND WIOLL-U^DERSTOOD INFECTION. 



To an epidemiologist this enormous prevalence of plague steadily 

 from year to year among the rural ])opulation of India is perhaps the 

 most remarkable phenomenon in his science. It is all the more re- 

 markable that we have never thought of India as a great seat of 

 plague in former times, such as I^ower Egypt, Syria, and Irak had 

 been during many centuries of Mohammedan rule, and that we were 

 beginning to look upon plague as a thing of the past everywhere. In 

 writing the article on " Quarantine '' for the Encyclopaxlia Britan- 

 nica twenty years ago I gave nearl}^ all the space to yellow fever and 

 cholera, remarking of plague that " for many years it has ceased to 

 have any practical interest in this connection." although it had been 

 the original object of all the quarantine laws of Europe. And to 

 show that I was not singular the paragraph on port quarantine in 

 the Bombay Sanitary Commissioner's Report for 1887 has this sen- 

 tence : " Plague and yellow fever have never to my knowledge existed 

 in Bombay, and are not in present circumstances ever likely to be 

 there met with " (T. G. Hewlett, 1. c, p. 82). The outbreak in Bom- 



