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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![(MiiToiit. 'Flui j)cue(r:i(ion of tlu! house by j>touiu1 air is a peculiar risk ill India for several reasons. AVhere the vails are of mud, as they are in the <>Teat majority of plague villages, and have no ma- sonry plinth to rest upon, their i)orons substance is really a part of the soil, so that the inmates have the ground air not only rising from the floor', but carried up in the walls as if in a ventilating shaft. A dwelling house warmed all day by the sun and by the tire kei)t uj) for cooking becomes like an exhausted receiver for the ground air to rise into. If one visits the old chawls at Bomba}^, in which there has been so much plague, you find the narroiv, dark rooms on the ground floor to be heated like an oven even at 8 in the morning. The intuitive perceptions of the people correspond withdhe scien- tific theory of a soil poison. They know that the chief risk of taking plague is from spending the night in an infected place, and gener- ally that they incur the greatest risk when confined most to the dwell- ing houses by cold, domestic duties, or other cause. One very im- portant thing I must pass over for want of time, nainel_y, the inju- rious effect of a high level of the ground water and of its seasonal fluctuations in a filth-sodden soil. In the new chawls at Bombay, built by the imjirovement trust, nothing seemed to me to promise moi’e for the future health than the solid masonry of the foundations, floors, and jjassages. The advantages of concrete foundations have been ])roved often in similar circumstances, although in Hongkong they hav(' been only a palliative in ])lagne. I'KOUAIU.K FI Tl Hi: OF I'nACUK IN JNDIA. I come lastly to the (piei^tion. Is there anything to be learned as to its probable duration from historical precedents and fi'om its own course during nine years? One ivas sometimes asked wdiether the natural lime for jilagne in India to last was not seven or eight years. The origin of the idea is what is recorded of tivo former plagues in India—one in the reign of the Emjieror Jehangir, IGIG, of which it is said that “ it continued to devastate the country for eight years,” the other in the reign of Aurnngzeb, 1C)S8, which “lasted seven or eight years. Each of these epidemics of bubonic plague is authenticated twice over by good contemporary authoilties, along with some inter- esting particulars which I have no time to quote. The earlier of the two liegan in the Punjab at Lahore and “ destroyed many villages and jiarganas; ” the later, seventy years after, ivas felt most in Oc- tober and Xovember, 1088, in the city of Bijapnr, which Aurnngzeb had just captured and in Avhich his army was encamped, including 15.000 caiailry; but it is said to have lasted seven or eight years and to have extended over the Deccan and as far as Ahmedabad and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22406967_0032.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
