The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 1900. THE BUBONIC PLAGUE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 12, 22 March 1900, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 1900. THE BUBONIC PLAGUE.

fOME five years ago an Anglican clergyman in Melbourne wrote a * creepy ' work of fiction entitled The Germ-growers. These were represented as a race of half -men half-demons dwelling in the wild heart of Australia, gifted with the faculty of invisibility at will, filled to the roots of their wiry hair with hatred of the human race, and ceaselessly occupied from New Year's Day to St. Silvester's in cultivating the germß of plague and pestilence and bearing them on the four winds of heaven in invisible chariots to every part of the wide earth. Just now Australia is in very deed a centre for the cultivation of one of the most dreaded pestilences that has ever cut human soul and body apart. We refer to the bubonic plague. This woful pest has crept quietly along the paths of commerce from its home in India, has settled down in Australia, and from that vantage-point now threatens a descent upon tbe shores of New Zealand. To the cities that are sanitary and the individuals that are clean and healthy the unwelcome intruder can bring no special terrors — for, like all such plagues, it grips its victims best amidst dirt and damp and darkness and in places where underfeeding and overcrowding prevail. It is not, like the cholera, a plague of recent growth. It has a long history — if we can trust the annalists — and has travelled far from its eastern home, and held a high death's revel in the cities of the west in the days when — for military reasons — great populations were crowded within the limits of a village green, in narrow and tortuous and undrained streets and tall and overhanging houses.

Warlike days and warlike ways are not favourable to the work of the scavenger and the municipal watering-cart. During the Franco-German war the street-cleaner shouldered the chassepot. At Kimberley and Ladysmith the dustman and the rest of the health department spent much of their time manning the redoubts. Hence much typhoid, or the aggravation thereof. In the far-off days— it was in 1b46 —when the bubonic plague first stole westward from Persia to that great plague exchange, the Levant, and from the Levant to Italy, the civic fathers of Europe were more harassed with thoughts of war than with drainage schemes and sewage gas. But, then, public hygiene is in part a rediscovered art : three centuries before the birth of Christ —as far back as the days of Tarquinius Superbus — the old Romans had their ponderous drainage system (part of it still in operation) presided over by a special sewer-goddess whom men called CLOAdNA. But in the temporary wreck of civilisation that followed the invasion of the northern hordes, such luxuries as public sanitation fell into disuse. People were glad of the privilege to live on anyhow amidst the ruins left by the barbarians from the north. The slow and patient labours of the monks won Europe back again to civilisation. They were the tillers, the swamp-reclaimers, the planters, the colonisers, the road-makers, the bridgebuilders, the architects, the men of letters, the physicians of soul and body, the founders of well-drained and wellconstructed hamlets, many of which subsequently grew into great cities and centres of trade. It had been well for Europe if those grand old pioneers of modern civilisation had been given as free a hand within the battled walls of the old cities whose narrow and tortuous and ill-aligned streets were often re-built at haphazard— as in Rome— on the piled-up ruins caused by the Vandals. But the keenness of the struggle foi mere existence in the early middle ages and the warlike spirit of the later were unfavourable to sanitary reforms in the cities where temporal lords with heavy mailed fists held sway. Florence, for instance, in 1348 was, nevertheless, better off in the matter of sanitation than was London at so comparatively recent a date as the period between the Restoration and the Revolution. And yet it was well prepared to harbour the bubonic plague —it was then called the Black Death — which searched it through and through in that fateful year. This was the most dreadful of all the plagues of which history bears a record. It set out from Persia on its westward journey in 1346. Its outriders or advance agents were vast swarms of locusts that choked the wells and poisoned the water with countless tons of their festering bodies in the countries that lie east of the Caspian Sea. It stopped at Bagdad for a ' spell ' and in 90 days killed off half a million people. It 'looked in' at Cairo, and its breath slew 10,000 Egyptians in 24 hours. Then up and away to the west— this was in 1348 — and it searched Europe for four of the most fearful years in all its history.

When this old bubonic plague stole into Florence, the city fathers took some sensible sanitary precautions. But alack ! they were not taken in time. The condition of our most insanitary modern town is much better than that which prevailed at Florence or Rome in a.d. 1348. But even in New Zealand things sanitary are not everywhere gay. If Southey were living now he could as easily count two-and-seventy different smells on the Dunedin foreshore as he did in his wanderings through the winding streets of Cologne. We do well to remember even in this progressive Colony that the hygiene of a great city and the personal habits of the mass of the dwellers therein are not to be radically altered in a few days by a police cordon and a big new besom and a mayoral placard. They tried those things in Florence. They probably diminished the total deathrate. But none the less three-fifths of the population or some 100,000 persons all told — were swept into untimely graves by the Black Death. The same number died in London and Valencia. Dublin loßt 14,000 of its inhabitants ; Strassburg 26,000 ; Genoa, Parma, and Vienna 40,000 each ; Norwich and Paris each 50,000 ; Marseilles 56,000 ; Avignon and Naples each 60,000 ; Venice and Siena each 70,000. In England, says Green, « its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt of leprosy and fever.' In Bristol the living were scarcely numerous enough to give interment to the dead. 'Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England,' says Green, « more than

one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations.' Dr. Guy, who made a special study of the epidemics of the middle age, states ti at in the four years' sojourn of the Black Death in Europe it depopulated 30,000 towns and villages and wrenched apart the souls and bodies of 24,000,000 people ; and Milroy tells us that so late as the year 1350 ships were met at sea drifting aimlessly at the mercy of wind and tide with all on board dead of this fearsome plague.

Happily, plague prevention is better understood nowadays than in the panic times of the fourteenth century, and the heavy mortality of the olden time can never be repeated. It is now within the power of both the individual and the community to keep the bacillus of the bubonic plague at bay. Rat-traps, carbonic acid gas, and copious disinfection at the ports will undoubtedly stave off this microscopic intruder for a time. But he will probably break through at last and secure a local habitation on our shores. 'Plague,* says Dr. Hodgson, of Sydney, 'has always evaded the strictest quarantines,' and the protection of the public from its effects * will depend on the cleanliness of the people and the healthy state of their homes and persons.' The same authority says :—: — The conditions of life which favour plague and render people more liable to contract it are :—: — 1. Privation and want, poor food and washy diet. 2. Overwork and exhaustion. 3 Filth, dirt, uncleanliness, personal, private, and public ; storage of refuse in house, factories, or public places. 4. Overcrowding, many people associating in a small room ; ! deficient air space in living and sleeping accommodation. o. Darkness and dampness in dwellings, absence of sunlight in houseß, rooms below the level of the ground. ' All prevention,' he adds, 'lies in making a city and its people clean, vigorous, and healthy. A city will be more liable to plague or less liable according to its sanitary and personal conditions.' And again : ' Immunity from attack is only induced by the laws of health.' The bubonic plague is, in effect, a filth disease, and the home and the person that are clean and sanitary may regard without fear the probable coming of this uninvited visitor from India.