Indian hygiene and demography.

  • International Congress of Hygiene and Demography
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Indian hygiene and demography. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    214/270 (page 210)
    deposit in the wells in most Indian cantonments, and particularly at Lucknow, would reveal conditions of insanitation which would raise the question, not why so many suffer from fever, but how it is that any escape. When writingbn the subject of the late alarming increase of enteric fever in India, I found on inquiry that the cost of a Bull’s dredger, such as I have described, would be in India, complete with derrick, windlass, and 100 feet of chain, suitable for conveyance in a cart, and capable of erection in 15 minutes, 180 rupees. And now I have done, and in conclusion would only repeat that everything here stated or suggested is to be found in my official sanitary reports for the first circle North-West Provinces, extending over 20 years, from 1864; and I can only state that, as regards this circle, with its large military cantonments in the plains, and its hill sanatoria in the Himalayas, the conclusion arrived at by the Sanitary Department in India, and in this country, to the effect that the value of the European soldier’s life has greatly increased, owing to the improved sanitation of his surroundings, is just one of those delusions which, like a pricked air-bag, collapse before the sharp point of any careful inquiry. The increased value of the soldier’s life is due to a moral, not a physical sanitation, and total abstinence and its accompaniments have had more to do with this than all the sanitation which India has seen for the last 25 years. Take, for instance, the sanitary condition of the first circle as regards the work of the strictly sanitary depart- ment; it, was worse in 1884 than it was in 1864, as I am prepared to prove, for the defects of 1864 were allowed to go on unheeded and unremedied till 1884, when a wide-spread epidemic of typhoid fever was the penalty of years of the grossest violation of the first principles of sanitation in the matter of the water-supply; and the cases of typhoid fever in the large hill sanatorium of Chuckrata in the Himalayas, and the increasing unhealthiness of Roorki, Meerut, Muttra, and Agra are evidences that neglected sanitation in the point of water-supply must bring a terrible retribution. Enteric Fever in the European Army in India; its Etiology and Enteric fever, as regards its frequency and diffusion, marks widely its difference to all other forms of disease; it knows no geographical limits, and its very universality and infectiveness makes it one of Prevention. BY J. Lane Nottee, M.A., M.D., Professor of Military Hygiene at the Army Medical School, Netley. [Note.—This paper is reprinted from Volume VIII.]