PLAGUE IN MANCHURIA.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCIV, Issue 14364, 9 February 1911, Page 5

PLAGUE IN MANCHURIA.

-Tie appalling outbreak of plague which lias been claiming thousands of victims daily in Manchuria, recalls the enormous debt which Europe owes to the comparatively modern science of medical sanitation. Four or five centuries ago, a pestilence like that -which is now causing panic in Manchuria would probably have swept the western countries for a decade with almost equally destructive fury. The " Black Death" of the fourteenth century, which cost London alone over 100,000 lives, _ came from the East, and duripj? nearly twenty years ravaged in turn almost all the countries between China and the Irish Sea. In China nearly 13 millions are believed to have perished, in the remainder of the East nearly 24 millions, and in Europe 25 millions. r All animal life was threatened, and the dr-ad were cast in thousands into huge pits made for their reception. The pestilence was on the sea, as w=ll as on the land, and the imagination shudders at reports of .'hips drifting aimlessly, their decks covered with the dead and lvutrifying bodies of their crews, through the Mediterranean, the Black and the North Seas, carrying the fierce contagion to those chores on which the wind or tide might cast them. The " Gr-'at Plague " which attacked London in the seventeenth century, and carried off between 70,000 aid 100,000 persons, was only the and most destructive of 3 long series of similar visitations, rcw forgotten in the final horror. In 1603, sixty years before the latest scourge—3o,soo persons perished of the plague in London alone; and two years afterwards another great mortality was responsible for 35,400 deaths in London. Similar visitations were comparatively common in the East and Europe, and De Foe's account of the Great Plague is not so dreadful as descriptions of the ravages of similar epidemics in some Italian cities in the Middle Ages, when living conditions were mrjr reckless and medical knowle-.lge even less developed than iii Hit seventeenth century. The Roman Empire was ravaged by repsatod plagues, and as earlv as 430 A.P. a pestilence in Britain swept away such multitudes that the living were scarcely sufficient to bury the dead. The East, being, m De Quincey's phrase, tho part 'f the earth most swarming w.'b human life, has always i:e-n the special breeding place of plagues. The cities of China axe so i!en?ety populated and in parts sr. j'.Jiliy that destructive epidemics would be frequent if natural adaptation to environment had not made their native residents practically immune to ills which ordinaTilv would result from such surroundings. At times, however, the immunity breaks down, and then plague rages with a degree of mortality which it has ceased to exercise in Western kinds, where sanitation has been studied, and the individual, also, is less prone to fold liis arms and accept the " stroke of fate." Simultaneous with the plague outbreak in Sydney in 1809. which produced a mortality of 34 per cent., a

piiinlnr epidemic in TTon«rkon<r, though opposed by the most strenuous esertions of the British authorities, produced a mortality of 95 "per cent. It is not impossible that the plague now in 3lanchurin may ho carried to America, or Europe, or Australia, but there is no room to fVnr that it will ever with the same virulence in any town where laws of sanitation and hygiene are followed, as in the overcrowded, careless communities of the East.