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

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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$J EXTEACTS EELATING TO PLAGUE FROM REPORTS OF MEDICAL OFFICERS OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD. 1.—JExtract from the Annual 'Report of the Medical Officer to the Frivy Council and Local Government Board for the year 1874 {Mr. Simo7i). Foreign Epidemics. As another non-administrative work of the Board in the Medical Department, I have to refer to the cognizance which is kept np of the progress of foreign epidemics; partly with regard to any existing possibilities of their extending to this country or its dependencies, and partly with reference to the quarantine-conduct of other countries. In this branch I have of late years had constant assistance from Mr. Netten E^adcliffe, who notes for the office all information received from Her Majesty's Indian, Colonial, and Poreign Secretariats, with regard to the epidemics and quarantines of other countries. In 1866, when submitting my eighth annual report to the Privy Council, I presented a report by Mr. Padcliffe, bringing down to that date an account of such foreign movements of cholera as were of interest to this country; and Mr. RadclifFe is now compiling a continuation of that account in a paper which I hope shortly to lay before you in a supplement to the present report. As regards the foreign epidemics of 1874, I am glad to be able to report further subsidence of the continental cholera-wave which was seriously threatening us in 1871 and 1872, but has since that time been retreating, and appears now to be at its lowest ebb. On the other hand, I have to state that during 1874 Levantine Plague came into unusual mention in some of the foreign correspondence; that in one of the Temen provinces of Arabia, among the high-lying villages of the Assur country, which had been visited by the disease in 1816 and 1853, there were considerable out- breaks of plague in 1874; that in Tripoli, too, a small outbreak of plague again affected the encampments of Benghazi, where already there had been an outbreak in 1858 ; that in the Lower Euphrates Valley, where the Hindieh marsh-country had had an outbreak in 1867, the Afij marsh-country (on the opposite side of the river) suffered in 1874 a severe outbreak; and that, at least of the last, the consequences are not yet ended : for the disease spread in both directions, from Kerbela to Samawa, producing very large mortality, and at the date of my present report is still continuing.* Plague has now for so long been comparatively unknown in the countries where it used to be most fatally endemic, and European interest in it has in consequence become so nearly obsolete, that, in hearing of outbreaks such as the above, we are without suffi- cient standards for prognosticating as to their relative importance. Undoubtedly, however, the above-mentioned concurrence of outbreaks is exceptional; and if it expresses that Plague is really for the time tending to re-development in the countries which formerly bred it, the facts may be of general interest, if only with reference to the derangements of traffic which could hardly fail to arise, were Plague again to show itself in any considerable port of the Red Sea or the Mediterranean. March 31, 1875. John Simon. 2.—Extract from the Annual Report of the Medical Officer to the Frivy Council and Local Government Board for the year 1875 {Mr. Simon). In respect of the cognizance which the Medical Department has to take of the progress of foreign epidemics, I subjoin [see p. 5 of these papers] a memorandum by Mr. Netten Radcliffe on the modern history and more recent movements of Levantine Plague. I regret to observe that at the present time the infection of the * In the winter 1870-1, there had been an outbreak of plague in Persian Kurdistan, where previously none had been observed since 1835 ; and when the Hindieh outbreak of 1867 occurred, plague had not been observed in Mesopotamia since 1834.$