122 HAPPY INDIA 



epidemic diseases, Dr. Charles Creighton. He went 

 to India when the plague was at its height, and he 

 found that in the British quarters of a city, where 

 all the sanitary arrangements were good, there was no 

 plague, but on the other side of the river, where 

 the sanitary arrangements were bad, the plague 

 was very severe. The only way to abolish plague 

 is to pull down the insanitary huts and build clean 

 huts, and enforce sanitary arrangements, and give 

 the people enough food. From dysentery and 

 diarrhoea the deaths per annum have varied from 

 264,000 up to 291,000. These deaths, of course, 

 may be due to many causes, chiefly insanitary 

 arrangements and defective feeding. The way of 

 preventing or reducing the amount of these four 

 diseases that I have mentioned is well known to 

 engineers who have given attention to sanitary 

 matters. It is simply a question of capital outlay 

 and annual expense, and if health is worth having 

 it is very cheap at the price. 



Now we come to the great disease, the amount 

 of which throws all others into the shadow, that 

 which appears in the Indian statistics as " fevers." 

 In the ten years ending 1919, the annual deaths 

 from " fevers " varied from just under 4,000,000 

 up to a little over 11,000,000. Leaving out the 

 year 1918, the nine years' average was rather over 

 4,000,000 a year. Now, it is these fevers that are the 

 enemy of the Englishman and of everybody else. 

 It is these " fevers " that the doctors do not know 

 how to cure and which may puzzle the sanitarian. It 



