"I first started inoculation here on 11th May.... When I began
my inoculations, I operated first of all on some European or
native gentlemen in front of a crowd of poor and low-caste
people, whom I had gathered together in the worst-affected area,
and they were thus soon induced to ask for inoculation
themselves.... They have presented themselves, by the hundred,
at all times of the day, before myself and others, for the
purpose of being inoculated.[34] ... I have never experienced
the slightest difficulty in inoculating Mussulmanis or any
other purdáh women in Hubli.... The very men who, in March last,
created a disturbance in Hubli, were not only the first and the
most willing to undergo inoculation, but also to bring their
wives and families to my hospital, or to invite me to their
homes to inoculate them.
[34] Compare the account of the inoculations at Gaday, in the
_Lancet_, 11th February 1898: "To see the crowd waiting and
struggling to pass the barrier is a strange sight; old men and
women, young children, and mothers with babes in their arms, form
a daily crowd numbered by hundreds, who wait for hours to get
their chance of the day's inoculation."
"Inoculated persons holding certificates of double inoculation
have, at my special wish and order, been left in their homes
throughout this epidemic; only their clothes, house, and
property being disinfected on the occurrence of a plague case or
death in their house. As the vast majority of plague cases have
never been notified before death in Hubli (nor, in my experience
of nearly two years, elsewhere, if native supervision be largely
resorted to), it will readily be understood that the majority of
the inoculated have actually been living in the same house, or
even room, with a plague case (often of the pneumonic type,
whose terrible power of spreading the disease was first shown by
Professor Childe, I.M.S., of Bombay) during the whole of the
time that case was living, probably attending on the patient,
breathing the same stuffy air, and, perhaps, sharing the same
blanket; and I attach at the end of this report a long series of
cases where such conditions have occurred, _the non-inoculated
dying of plague, and the inoculated escaping, almost to a man_.
"Various critics on my work, not knowing what the actual facts
were and are, have at different times asserted that the
inoculated inhabitants of Hubli left the town in larger numbers
than the non-inoculated. Exactly the reverse was the case. The
British officers on plague duty here, and all the Divisional
Superintendents, invariably replied (officially and in writing
when so required) that the non-inoculated left Hubli in far
greater numbers and proportion than the inoculated; and my own
observations entirely bear out this statement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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