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 suli'ered severely in the same year, the talukas within a given dis- trict have been affected some one year, some another, and the villages of a given tiiluka have been affected in a kind of rotation. I have shown on the screen the tables of nine villages, Avhich on the whole agree in proving that each village has had one vei’y severe outbreak, usually the first, that there have been years absolutely clear, and that the subsequent outbreaks have been much less extensive than the original one. It is in the A’ery notion or definition of the word “ epi- demic ” that there shall be intermissions; the word “endemic” means a more steady prevalence from year to yeai-—but in that no- tion also the steadiness is only in the aggregate of a whole country or province, not in the several counties or parishes of it. It is prob- able that all the villages of Bombay Presidency b}'^ this time have had their worst experience of plague, and that in each village plague has visited all the houses in turn, or as many of them as it is ever likely to visit. The Bombay figures for the season just ended are encouraging. Whether it be owing to the resolute practice of evacua- tion on the first signs of plague or because the invasion is subsiding naturally, the returns since January have been only about one-third those of the three or four years i^rcceding for the corresponding weeks. It looks as if the maximum had been reached and passed, both for eacli locality and in the aggregate of the whole Presidency, and that there is to be a pause. Such pauses occur in all epidemic infections. We account for them by a ])hrase or formula that the infection has exhausted all the “ susceptible subjects,” and we explain the return of the epidemic after an interval of years by the fact that a new generation has grown up which contains more “ susceptible subjects.” What can be proved from tlie admirably full statistics of the Bom- bay Presidency ma}>' be perceived in a way in the Punjab. Thus, in Jullundur, in January this year, I learned that the average was being kept np to that of former years chiefly by returns from a certain group of villages in the soutliAvest which Avere having plague in them for the first time. The province as a Avhole is to haA^e more plague deaths this year than it has had hitherto; but it Avould certainly IniA’e shoAvn a decrease but for the A^ery large items of three districts in the Delhi division—Gurgaon, Rohtak, and Hissar—Avhich are haAung their first severe epidemic. The prognosis for the Punjab should be that the infection has reached its height and done its Avorst for the time in the districts first attacked and that it Avill soon begin to shoAv a decline in the aggregate, folloAving in the Avake of Bombay Presidency. This is the first year in Avhich the United Provinces and Behar haA^e returned such large totals as Ave have been accustomed to for seA’eral](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22406967_0034.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
