The Theory tested by Modern Instances.
With that general statement for the long succession of plague-epidemics in Islam during nine centuries from the Hegira, beginning with a Syrian epidemic in A.D. 628 and ending with a close succession of twelve epidemics in Egypt from 1410 to 1492, we may pass to the more detailed accounts of the conditions under which bubo-plague has been found in various localities, often circumscribed spots far apart and out of the way, during recent years. These spots are so varied, have so little apparently in common, and are so capriciously chosen in the midst of their several regions of the globe, that they do not readily fall into any order or classification. What are we to make of a few spots of plague among nomade Arabs of the Cyrenaic plateau; of plague in some stricken villages high up in the highlands of Kurdistan, or in low-lying towns such as Resht, near the shore of the Caspian, or amidst the black ooze of amphibious habitations in the lower valley of Tigris and Euphrates; of true bubonic disease in some few Bedouin villages or small towns on the summits of the basaltic plateaus that rise like gigantic warts from the Arabian desert; of bubo-plague in Yun-nan, at or near the capital Talifoo, where the Mohammedan and Chinese influences have been struggling for mastery, as well as among the cabins in the rocky valleys of the Salwen; of some forty or fifty Himalayan hamlets picked out as plague-spots among the six thousand villages of Kumaon; and of the now extinct but comparatively recent centres of the same disease in the walled towns and walled villages of Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar? And lastly what are we to make of those cases of typhus fever with buboes which have been observed in villages of the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852; in the Chinese town of Pakhoi, on the gulf of Tonking, in 1886; occasionally among the fever-cases in Burdwan since the health of that province underwent so disastrous a change about the year 1870; and, on credible report, among the troops in the Russo-Turkish war of 1879? It is surely unnecessary, at least, to refute the sterile dogmatism that these are all the effects of one pre-existing virus, carried, we know not how, from point to point of the globe in an unbroken succession. It is a far cry even on a small-scale map from Kumaon to Kutch, from Yun-nan to the Gulf of Tonking, from Resht to the Armenian highlands, from the centre of Arabia to Tripoli, and from Mesopotamia to North Yemen. And what is the use of assuming that there has always been bubo-plague in the “cradle of the human race,” and concluding that the Black Death was one of its excursions westwards, so long as the plagues of Islam were going on from decade to decade, all through the Middle Ages, at no great distance from Byzantium and from Western Europe? Are not Damascus, Bagdad and Grand Cairo of more account as plague-foci than a few villages in the Himalaya or in Kattiwar, even granting that the plague may have been in the latter at an earlier date than we know? It is not communication that connects the several seats of plague, scattered widely in time and place; but it is community of conditions, or of the causes and associated circumstances which breed the plague in each separately. Let us take them in some sort of order.
Among the most remarkable habitats of modern bubo-plague are the villages on the basalt plateaus of the Arabian desert. We have information of these plague-spots from Doughty[307], who did not indeed visit Assir, the most notorious of them, but several others more to the north and east. He describes the ruined villages of Mogug, Gofar, Hâyil and others, where the people had died of plague some years before. A year of dearth preceded the plague in some, if not in all of them. The author is struck by the carelessness of burial, or the difficulties of it in the baked soil, although he does not directly connect that with the epidemics. Thus, in passing the graveyard of Hâyil, one of the plague-towns, he remarks: “Aheyd was a man of much might and glory in his day; he lies a yard under the squalid gravel in his shirt.” Of Kheybar, with vague traditions of plague, he says: “We passed through a burial-ground of black volcanic mould and salt-warp; the squalid grave heaps are marked with headstones of wild basalt. That funeral earth is chapped and ghastly, bulging over her enwombed corses, like a garden soil in spring-time which is pushed by the new spring plants. All is horror at Kheybar!” He is led to the following general remarks: “The care of sepulture was beyond measure in the religions of antiquity, which were without humility. Under the new religion [of Arabia] the deceased is wound in a shirt-cloth of calico, and his corse is laid in the shallow pit of droughty earth.” Again, of Bedouin burials in general: “The deceased is buried the same day or on the morrow. They scrape out painfully with a stick and their hands in the hard-burned soil a shallow grave. I have seen their graves in the desert ruined by foul hyenas, and their winding-sheets lay half above ground.”
Of the best known of these Arabian plague-spots the plateau of Assir, to the south-east of Mecca, we have the following information relating to the years 1874-79[308]; the chief plague-locality is Namasse, the principal town of Beny Sheir, with five other villages.
The site is on a mountain ridge too high for camels, the climate is cold and moist, the soil fruitful, springs abundant, and no standing water. The houses are built of stone, and stand close together. The ground-floor of each house is used as the stable; and as the winter in these mountains is very severe, so that water freezes, the inhabitants live with their cattle in a horrible state of filth. According to information from the district superintendent, there had been plague in a few villages every two or three years for the previous thirty-five or forty years. It has seldom extended further than five or six leagues. The region is a mountain canton, with no trade; it is cut off from the rest of the world. The disease is mostly attended with buboes in the groins, armpits, and neck, but not always; sometimes petechial spots were spoken of; in the sheikh Faïk’s own household the disease began with rigors, and developed buboes, petechiæ, headache and burning thirst. Dr Nury counted up in six villages, with a population of eight hundred, cases of plague to the number of 184 (68 men, 45 women, 50 boys and 21 girls), with 155 deaths and 29 recoveries.
Let us now place beside this the accounts of the plague in the mountains village of Kumaon[309].
Of the plague-villages of Danpore and Munsharee, near the snow, we read:
“Their houses are generally built of stone, one storey high. On the ground-floor herd the cattle; in this compartment the dung is allowed to accumulate till such time as there is no room left for the cattle to stand erect; it is then removed and carefully packed close around all sides, so that the house literally stands in the centre of a hot-bed.... In many instances we have seen it accumulated above the level of the floor of the upper story in which the family lives.” In that compartment, four feet high, with no window and a door of some three feet by eighteen inches, ten or fifteen people live, lying huddled together with the door shut. Their food is as poor as their lodging. When plague breaks out, the family ties are rudely loosened: those who can, flee to the jungle, leaving the stricken to their fate.
The following is by Renny: “Fourteen died at a place in the forest half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families, the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague] commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in their houses.”
Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in the same district in 1876-77[310].
Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the houses—the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and unripe grain—he directs attention specially to the disposal of the dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For, by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation, their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered throughout the northern half of the province. Even in each of those few villages, the plague is confined to one house, or one terrace, or one portion of the village.
Let us turn next to the small spots of bubo-plague in the remote province of Yun-nan. Our information comes from members of the British and French Consular services[311].
The plague occurs in towns and villages and is the cause of much mortality. After ravaging villages scattered about the plains, it frequently ascends the mountains, and takes off many of the aborigines inhabiting the high lands. What, in M. Rocher’s opinion, aggravates the evil is the practice of not burying the bodies of those who die of this disease. Instead of being buried, the body is placed on a bier and exposed to the sun. As a consequence of this practice the traveller passing the outskirts of a village where the plague is raging is nearly choked with the nauseous smell emanating from the exposed and rotting corpses. Burial is the usual mode of disposal, although many of the villages are on rocky mountain sides, as in Kumaon. The rats are first affected; as soon as they sicken, they leave their holes in troops, and after staggering about and falling over each other, drop down dead. Mr Baber had the same information from a French missionary in the upper valley of the Salwen, a long, low valley about two miles broad, walled in by immense precipices, so hot in summer that the inhabitants go up the hill sides to live. The approach of bubo-plague (the buboes may be as large as a hen’s or goose’s egg) may often be known from the extraordinary behaviour of the rats, who leave their holes and crevices and issue on to the floors without a trace of their accustomed timidity, springing continually upwards from their hind legs as if they were trying to jump out of something. The rats fall dead, and then comes the turn of the poultry, pigs, goats, etc. The good father had a theory of his own that the plague is really a pestilential emanation slowly rising in an equable stratum from the ground, the smallest creatures being first engulfed. The larger plague-centre at or near the capital, Talifoo, appears to be related to Mohammedan warfare, and possibly to the neglect to bury the dead, which is an admitted fact, although not connected by the narrator with the prevalence of plague.
The other Chinese plague-spot is hundreds of miles away, on the shores of the Gulf of Tonking. The best known centre of plague is the port of Pakhoi, the native quarter of which is described as peculiarly filthy. The houses are little cleaner than the streets, the floors being saturated with excrement, and the drains being either close to the surface or open altogether. An outbreak of plague there in 1882 is minutely described by Dr Lowry[312].
It occurred in the hot weather of June (85° Fahr. day, 76° Fahr. night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: “anyone going to the bedside of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had to deal with.” The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal, every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi.
One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead. Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal. “Here,” says Dr Macgowan, “was evidently a subsoil poison which affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect animals that live above ground[313].”
The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years 1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work. The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of typhus—walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions—in the streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat.