HUBLI 



219 



the determination was formed to make a bold and 

 comprehensive experiment with the prophylactic, 

 and not on any a priori grounds. If this experi- 

 ment had failed, the results, judged by the actual 

 mortality among the uninoculated, would have been 

 appalling. All possible sanitary measures in the 

 shape of disinfection, unroofing of houses, and segrega- 

 tion, were applied concurrently with inoculation, as 

 Government are already aware; but the rate of 

 mortality among those who held back from inoculation 

 rose at one time to a height ivhich, I believe, has 

 never been approached elsewhere. . . . 



" However, the experiment, in the hands of Dr 

 Leumann, did not fail, and it has afforded a 

 demonstration of success which is of Imperial 

 importance. Many thousands of lives have un- 

 doubtedly been saved, and at the present moment 

 the plague mortality is merely sporadic, and Hubli 

 is steadily regaining its normal population and 

 trade, though surrounded by infected villages." 



The Hubli report must be put at full length, for 

 the vivid picture it gives of plague in India, and 

 of the difficulties besetting the magnificent work of 

 the Indian Medical Service. It is a story that Mr 

 Kipling ought to write. And it is to be noted that 

 Surgeon-Captain Leumann, who saved Hubli, re- 

 cognised the extreme importance of other methods 

 than inoculation — disinfection, isolation of cases, 

 evacuation of infected districts. He says : — 



" While paying the highest tribute to the value 

 of Mr HafTkine's inoculation method, which 1 claim, 

 here in Hubli, to have put to perhaps the severest 

 test to which it has yet been subjected, I am of 



