Plague in India / by Charles Creighton.

  • Charles Creighton
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Plague in India / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    not carry plague infection, for example, in the plague hospital (where they abounded), from a patient to a nurse; but they found that it was not so, although everyone was bitten. Various other insects were next thought of, and at lengtl\ the interest has centered in fleas as possible carriers of infection from the rat. Eesearches of a very minute and technical kind were started by this hypothesis on the lines of the well-known microscopic researches on mosquitoes. Captain Liston has conducted, in India, a large amount of research upon the fleas which infest the rat. The question next arises whether those are the same species of fleas which produce the human flea-bites; then there is the question whether those who take plague had been bitten b}'^ fleas in matter of fact; and, lastly, the question of microbes in the fleas. All this is, no doubt, a very promising field of academic inquiiy; and I am given to under- stand that the scientific expedition Avhich has been announced Avith a flourish of trumpets as about to proceed to India “ to make a thorough investigation into the causes and origin of plague ” is really going out to Avork in the laboratory at Kasauli, Avith a vieAV to settling all those open questions in the hypothesis of flea-bites. rLAGUE UJCALITIES. Just as in a Avell-knoAvn paper read before a certain scientific club, “ the theory of tittlebats ” Avas joined naturally to their habitat, the Hampstead Ponds, so I Avould Avish to pass, Avith no abrupt transition, from the bacteriology of plague to the localities of it. Before I started on my recent expedition, I spent seA^eral months in getting up the gazetteers of the districts Avhich I meant to visit, partly to become acquainted Avith a strange country and partly to note any facts as to population, poverty, kind of soil, height of ground Avater, canal irri- gation, rainfall, or the like, Avhich might throAV light upon the inci- dence of plague upon some localities rather than on others. There Avas probably some reason Avhy the villages of loAver Bengal should haA’e escaped plague absolutel^^, AA’hile those of Behar have had several bad seasons of it, or Avhy the districts of Oudh should haA^e had so much less plague than those of the Agra province, or Avhy the Punjab districts of Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur have each lost 80,000 by it, but the district of Kangra none, although it has an incessant traffic with them by the old and new Dharmsala roads. But the contrast which seemed, on paper, to be the best worth inA^estigating was that between the Bombay coast districts of Kolaba and Ratnagiri, and the districts across the Ghats from Satara to Dharwar.
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