Experiments on Animals - Stephen Paget

"The total number of inoculations performed in Hubli, both on actual inhabitants and on people from outside (villages) between 11th May and 27th September, amounts to some 78,000 altogether."

Dates.	Census of Hubli.	Non- Inoculated.	Inoculated.	Plague-deaths among:
Dates.	Census of Hubli.	Non- Inoculated.	Inoculated.	Non- Inoculated.	Inocu- lated.
Five weeks from May 11	Fell from 50,000 to
to June 14	47,427	44,573	2,854	47	1
Week ending:
June 21	47,082	41,494	5,588	22	3
June 28	47,485	39,042	8,443	29	1
July 5	46,537	36,020	10,517	55	6
July 12	46,518	33,255	13,263	34	6
July 19	45,240	29,716	15,524	82	7
July 26	43,809	24,112	19,697	100	15
Aug. 2	43,707	21,031	22,676	140	16
Aug. 9	42,768	15,584	27,184	272	19
Aug. 16	40,441	10,685	29,756	386	61
Aug. 23	39,400	6,367	33,033	371	41
Aug. 30	38,210	4,094	34,116	328	28
Sept. 6	38,382	2,731	35,469	227	34
Sept. 13	38,408	1,116	37,292	138	47
Sept. 20	39,142	937	38,205	106	55
Sept. 27	39,315	603	38,712	58	20

Dates.	Plague death-rate. Comparison per 1000 between		Percentage reduction of Plague death-rate in favour of the Inoculated.
Dates.	Non- Inoculated.	Inoculated.
Five weeks from May 11
to June 14	1.022	.350	Over	65 per cent.

Week ending:
June 21	.530	.527	About	1 per cent.
June 28	.742	.118	Nearly	85 per cent.
July 5	1.524	.570	About	63 per cent.
July 12	1.022	.452	Nearly	56 per cent.
July 19	2.793	.450		84 per cent.
July 26	4.147	.761		82 per cent.
Aug. 2	6.656	.705		89 per cent.
Aug. 9	17.325	.698	Over	96 per cent.
Aug. 16	33.694	2.083		94 per cent.
Aug. 23	57.011	1.241		98 per cent.
Aug. 30	80.116	.820		98 per cent.
Sept. 6	83.112	.958		99 per cent.
Sept. 13	112.903	1.260	Over	99 per cent.
Sept. 20	113.127	1.439	Over	99 per cent.
Sept. 27	96.185	.517	Over	99 per cent.

"It appears that if the 47,427 inhabitants had remained, as they did—in their town, without running away by rail or otherwise, or without camping out in a mass—and if no inoculation had been resorted to—they would have lost 24,899 souls, or a little over half of their number. The official records show that this has actually occurred, during the present terrible outbreak, in a number of large villages, of 2000 inhabitants and over, in the Hubli taluka and elsewhere in the Dhárwár District, where no inoculation was done, and no camping-out was possible on account of the wet weather." (Haffkine's commentary on Dr. Leumann's report.)

That is the story of Hubli; and, as it stands, it is almost incredible. The Commissioners, by very strict inquiry, reduced it to credibility without robbing it of glory. The inquiry brought out more instances of the immeasurable difficulty of the work. Natives who wished to avoid inoculation would escape through the back door at the sight of a plague officer: bribery, personation, sale or transfer of certificates of inoculation, concealment of cases and of deaths, were all practised by those who wished not to be inoculated, or to get the privileges of the inoculated without inoculation, or to save their infected houses from being disinfected and unroofed. Again, with the people dying like flies, and many of them bearing no mark of identification, and with the medical officers overworked past human endurance, the wonder is, not that the statistics were faulty, but that there are any statistics at all. Certainly, the Commission is well within the mark in saying, "It is quite clear that a very large number of lives must have been saved in Hubli by inoculations during the whole course of the epidemic there. Moreover, we may note that an arithmetical estimate is not the only criterion by which we can appreciate the value of inoculations. And in Hubli their value is approved by the consensus of opinions of officers who have seen probably far more of this process and its results in practice than any other persons in India, and who, having every facility for forming a sound judgment as to its effect where plague was really virulent, are satisfied as to its great value."

Finally, as at Daman so at Hubli, there are lesser groups of statistics, of that kind which is approved by the consensus of opinions of officers. These are, (1) Lieutenant Keelan's house-to-house investigation; (2) the Southern Mahratta Spinning Mills; (3) the Southern Mahratta Railway employés.

1. Lieutenant Keelan made a house-to-house visitation of 200 houses, in each of which there were protected and unprotected persons living together, and in each of which there had been one or more cases of plague. The figures for 69 of these houses are appended to Captain Leumann's report. They are as follows:—

	Inmates.	Cases.	Deaths.	Mortality.
Inoculated	336	11	4	1.19
Uninoculated	144	84	80	55