Plague : papers relating to the modern history and recent progress of Levantine plague / prepared from the time to time by direction of the president of the Local Government Board, with other papers ; sented to both House of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty.
- Radcliffe, Netten.
- Date:
- 1879
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Plague : papers relating to the modern history and recent progress of Levantine plague / prepared from the time to time by direction of the president of the Local Government Board, with other papers ; sented to both House of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![will reap the fruit of their labours, for the people are fast beginning to feel their power, and the immediate result of this disturbance has been to replace the bridge across the river, to open the roads, and allow free communication, the only restric- tions being the quarantines established on the border of the Province.* These observations of Mr. Colvili and the observations of Colonel Nixon, also quoted, upon the quality of the measures of quarantine against plague established by the Ottoman Government, prove that these measures afforded no security against the extension of the disease, while they directly aggravated the conditions which foster its prevalence. It must be mentioned, however, that the Ottoman General Board of Health, at the date of Mr. ColvilFs despatch, from which the extracts last quoted are taken, still reposed faith in the efi6.caciousness of the measures, the operation of which he describes. In answer to questions put during a meeting of the Board early in May by the Austro-Hungarian Delegate, on behalf of his Government, Dr. Bartoletti, as Chairman, replied (according to a despatch from Dr. Dickson, of Constantinople, dated 10th of May 1876), as follows :— Plague had not extended beyond Mesopotamia ; the cordons at Tekrid, on the Tigris route, and Salable, on the Euphrates route, had been strengthened, and appeared to bar effectually its transmission into Kurdistan and Syria. There was no apprehension of its being conveyed by sea owing to the restrictive measures enforced at Kurna, and the quarantine applied to arrivals from every part of the Persian Gulf. It is now known (though of course not then known to Dr. Bartoletti) that when he expressed this opinion, plague, carried, as it is believed, along a route free from any interruption at the frontier by quarantine restrictions, had passed the Mesopotamian border into Khuzistan, South-Western Persia, and that a serious outbreak in Shuster was at the time declining.f With reference to Colonel Nixon's and Mr. Colvili's observations on the effects of the quarantine measures adopted by the Ottoman authorities in damaging trade, interrupting the work of the labourer, and raising the price of' provisions, it may be weU to remark that to the present time plague in Mesopotamia has chiefly affected the poorer classes, among whom it would seem as if the margin between a sufficiency of food and scanty food were a very narrow one. An exceptional inundation, or a passing interruption of the trade of the district, appears at once to reduce a large proportion of these poorer people to a state of semi-starvation. It is true that during the years 1873 and 1874 there appears to have been abundance of grain and dates, the staple food of the poorer classes; but at the best the poor seem to subsist on an impoverished diet, and to live under conditions of domestic filth and per- sonal squalor, which are aggravated in the marsh villages, among which plague first originated, to a pitch wholly indescribable. The recent outbreaks of plague in 1874 in Bengazi (Tripoli), and in the Assyr district (Western Arabia), concurred with famine; in Persian Kurdistan (1871) with a state of extreme impoverishment which augmented the evils arising from the unutterable filth among which the communities first attacked with the disease lived. None of the Poreign Office despatches which have been communicated to this Department relative to the progress of plague in Mesopotamia contain any informa- tion as to the extent to which isolation of plague cases had been carried out in Bagdad and elsewhere, and the huts erected for the purpose brought into use. * Mr. Colvili, in a report to Colonel Nixon, dated 3rd August 1876, gives the following illustration, from personal experience, of river quarantine at Bagdad, in respect to plague, in 1874:— One would have thought that if any internal quarantine could be strictly kept, it Avonld be with passengers on board a river steamer. Such, however, was not the case, for when I arrived (at Bagdad) in quarantine in one river steamer, another was there before me, and many of the passengers were enjoying tliomselves in Bagdad. On board of my steamer were many Jewesses returning from a pilgrimage to the tomb of Ezra. A doleful few told me that while during the first evening one or two poor Jewesses c:imc out from Bagdad to be exchanged for their wealthier co-religionists on board, and required 55. for their trouble; now they wanted IL, or, to be more correct, a Turkish lira. All Jewesses, rich and poor, are wrapped up in sheets '• dyed with indigo, and it is impossible to recognise them. I saAV a servant of mine bearing on his shoulders a mountain of dirty clothes, in broad daylight, which I had been wearing while searching for plague on the Euphrates. No one cared, for, on my remonstrating, my head servant told me that he had arranged with the Guardian. I ordered the clothes back to the ship, but when I got into Bagdad I found them washed and ironed ready for use. t Persian pilgrims returning from Nedjef and Kerbela, also from Mecca, eluded the quarantine stations established on the frontier, by travelling, when it served their purpose, along a route by way of Kut-el-Amarah and Hawiza, which was not guarded by a quarantine station until, apparently, some two months after the appearance of plague in the district adjacent to Shuster. [Sec with reference to the outbreak in Khuzistan in connexion with other outbreaks in Persia, Memorandum No. III., p. 37.] P 3](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24751388_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
