On Preventive Inoculation. 



265 



from any of the inmates, and all were permitted to be inoculated. 

 This was in Dharwar, at the end of October and the beginning of 

 November, 1898, during the terrible outbreak of plague in that town 

 and district, the news of which must have reached you even here. 



Five cases of plague, of which one was imported, and four in old • 

 residents of the jail, occurred, all five ending fatally. 



The prisoners, then numbering 37 3, submitted in a body to inocula- 

 tion, and only one case followed, in a man attacked two days after 

 inoculation, and he recovered, the only one of the six. 



The Experiment of Undhera, in a Free Population. 



The most carefully planned out and precise demonstration of the 

 working of the prophylactic system among a free population, exposed 

 to a great amount of infection, was that made in the village of 

 Undhera, six miles from Baroda. 



The following was the mode of operation adopted : — 



A detailed census was made by the authorities of all the inhabitants 

 of the place, and on the 12th February, 1898, when a committee of 

 British and native officers arrived to carry out the inoculation, the 

 people were paraded in the streets, in four wards, family by family. 



Major Bannerman, I. M.S., of the Madras Medical Establishment, 

 and myself, accompanied by the Baroda officials, went from one house- 

 hold to another, and, within each, inoculated half the number of the 

 male members, half that of the females, and half that of the children, 

 compensating for odd figures that happened to be in one family by odd 

 figures in another. I, personally, and the officers who were with me, 

 directed special attention to distributing the few sick in the two groups 

 of inoculated and uninoculated as equally as our judgment permitted 

 us to do. 



The plague, which had carried off, before inoculation, seventy-nine 

 victims, continued afterwards in this instance for forty-two days and 

 appeared in twenty-eight families, in which the aggregate number of 

 uninoculated was sixty-four, and of inoculated seventy-one. 



The total number of attacks in those families was thirty-five, and 

 they were distributed as follows : — 



The 64 uninoculated had 27 cases with 26 deaths ; 

 The 71 inoculated „ 8 „ 3 „ , 



thus showing 89*65 per cent, of deaths fewer in the inoculated members 

 of the families than in the uninoculated. 



There were no deaths from other causes in the inoculated of the 

 village, while among the uninoculated there were three deaths attri- 

 buted to causes other than plague. 



The subjoined figures show the number of days which elapsed 



