3-085-746 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Plague in Bombay: president of the local committee and an Indian doctor on their daily round in the native quarter, 1898. 'House-to-house visitation. Facsimile of a Sketch by our Special Artist, Mr. Melton Prior...the plague...has burst forth again with peculiar malignancy in Bombay and Poona, and the number of deaths...in those centres last week reached the alarming total of six hundred and fifty-one. Every precaution that medical science can employ in checking the ravages of the epidemic is now being taken by the authorities...Between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. every day for the last [year] the President of the Local Committee...has gone his rounds accompanied by a native doctor. Information is obtained from paid spies as to where sufferers from the plague or the dead bodies of the victims are concealed, owing to the reluctance of their families to submit to quarantine...Mr. Prior...was much struck by the readiness with which [people] submit to medical inspection, holding out their wrists for the feeling of the pulse, and doing all in their power to facilitate the doctor's work. This, of course, applies to the healthy only, for the concealment practised by the plague-stricken themselves is one of the chief hindrances of the work of prevention'. From "Illustrated London News", 1898.