The Dominion. MONDAY, APRIL 3, 1911. THEORIES OF THE PLAQUE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1092, 3 April 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. MONDAY, APRIL 3, 1911. THEORIES OF THE PLAQUE.

The news of the three plague cases at Auckland and the death of one oi the patients does not seem to have created very much stir even in thai city. Experience of occasional outbreaks of the pestilence in this conntry and Australia has prepared the public to accept the assurances oi the Health Department that if proper precautions are taken there is no great cause for alarm. The precautions are chiefly isolation and proper treatment of cases, cleanliness, and sanitation. It is generallj held, also, that the destruction oi .rats, which are supposed to pass on the plague bacillus, through fleas, tc human beings, is an important measure of prevention. The "ra( theory" is, however, now being questioned. It happens to be discussed from opposite points of view by the latest issues that have reached.us oi .those ( two leading London weeklies, the Spectator and the Nation. The terrible visitation of the plague in Manchuria and the ascertained existence of plague-infected rats ovev a large area of England made the topic a vital one. At a meeting held uTider the presidency of the Lord Mayor of London a resolution was moved by Kin James CrichtonBrowne, the eminent doctor, calling upon people .throughout the country to confer as to the best methods of destroying rats. The cause was warmly taken, up by the Spectator, which proposed several modes of action. Buildings were to ba made rat-proof; and areas of land were tc bi surrounded by rat-proof fences. Precautions were to be taken at the ports, so that no rat should pass from a ship to the shore. Trapping, killing with dogs, clubbing, shooting, and poisoning were all recommended. The encouragement oi natural enemies of rats was considered, snakes being rejected as unsuitable, while stoats and , weasels ivere approved. "Why do we kill stoats and weasels V the Spectator asked. "They are the cleverest and .most relentless enemies that the rat has ever had. The answer is, of course, that they are also enemies of game."' Some patriotic, owner of an extensive East Anglian shooting was callecl upon to risk ,a depleted game-harder by ordering his keeper, as ari experiment, to let the stoats and weasels increase and multiply. By the adoption of means like those described, rats, though they could no( ba entirely exterminated, might, the Spectator thought, be so kept under as to be an almost negligible enemy to human health. If anyone suggested that the work would be expensive, the Spectator was ready with the reply, "What do the rats cost you now, and what would the plague cost you to-morrow 1" Turning to the Nation, we catch a very different tone. "There is a fashion in theories as in .ill else," said that journal. "The plain nian is firmly convinced to-day that it is the rat which carries plague. De Foe and his contemporaries blamed the cargoes of textile stuffs which cr.me from the East. But even in his day there were experts who accused the animals. Cats and dogs were the victims of human ignorance in 1665, and thousands of them wore slaughtered in vain to check the Great Plague. Have we any better grounds for accusing the rat?" Incidentally we may mention that the rat theory appears to have been "in fashion" along with the cat and dog theory in 1665, though his fact seems to have been overlooked by the writer in the Nation. The late Sir Walter Besant, in his London, recalls that in the Plague Year the citizens not only slaughtered all the cats arid dogs, because they thought those animals carried infection, but "they even tried, for the same reason, to poison the rats and mice, but apparently failed." The Nation admits that i-ats do perish in enormous numbers from the plague, but points out that their opportunities for direct contact with man are by no means obvious. The suggestion that their fleas are the carriers of their disease to man, it describes as "rather fantastic." Rats have had epidemics in which man did not share, and the plague ran its course at Glasgow in 1899 without a single case being discovered amongst the rats. In Bombay whole areas were cleared of rats, and it was just in those areas that the plague \vas most virulent. And "if rats sufficed to carry plague it has to be explained why- they ceased so suddenly to fulfil their mission of ruin about the time -when the Stuarts ceased to reign." "in fact, the Nation sees no reason to attribute the diffusion of plague to anything but its transmission from one human being to another. "The flattering explanation that it is our progress in cleanliness which has banished pestilence" is equally unacceptable to the Nation. 'The change in our own social habits began nowhere near the date ol the last visitation of the plague. One may doubt whether it was appreciable before the nineteenth century." Here the Nation is apparently on safe ground, for Lady Dorothy Nevill—than whom we could better spare, we sometimes fancy, a better historian—dates ''Saturday night tubbing" as an English institution from Henry VIII, "who is declared to have perfermed certain partial ablutions on occasional Saturday evenings," with the royal harbor, John Pens, ancestor of the famous Quaker, in attendance. Yet she recollects that, in the 'forties and 'fifties, and even later, bathrooms were still practically unknown, and guests worn "expected to perform their ablutions in the so-called fnot-bnths, which wore a sort of cross between a wine-cooler and a soup tureen." As for drainage and clean streets, the Nation supports its case against the theory that these have banished the plague

by referring to the unchanged dirtiness of the native quarters of the Turkish and Egyptian cities of today. But here again Siu Walter Besant supplies an interesting piece of evidence. He a pamphlet written in 1751 to advocate certain improvements in London, and learnt that "the streets were not cleaned, except in certain thoroughfares; at the back of the Boyal Exchange, for instance, was a scandalous accumulation of filth suffered to roniain, and the posterns of the city gates wore equally neglected and ahus?d. The rubbish shot into (he streets was not cleared away; think of the streets all discharging the duty of the dust-bin ! Cellar doors and windows were left open carelessly; stone steps projected from the houses far across the footpath. Where pavement had been laid down it was suffered to become, broken and ruinous, and so left/ . That was a hundred years after the Great Plague, which was the twelfth of its kind to visit the city in seven hundred years. There were three plagues of London in the seventeenth century—l6o3, 1625, and, the last and greatest, 1665. Since that date it has never returned, but if the pamphleteer of 1751 was a recorder of facts, it could not have been clean streets that kept it away. The Xαtion's, own theory as to why the pestilence is no longer a terror and appears to have boon "banished" is that we now- have "a vigilant hygienic police," and the cases nrc intelligently treated and vigorously isolated. "The plague was a mortal scourge in the West because of the cruel fears which shut the victim helpless in his house, to infect family and neighbours, and in the East : because of the audacious fatalism . which refused to take any precaution i whatever against infection. Panic i and defiance arc equally fatal. May ; it not bo a change of mind rather than an alteration of ' material conditions which has i defeated the pestilence?" One : more theory ■ of the plague. : Besant wrote: "It is generated in the broad miasmatic valley of the ; Euphrates; there it lies, ready to be ' carried the world, the last ' gift of Babylon to the nations. When that great city is built again, the centre of commerce between Europe i and the East, the valley will.once < more be drained and cultivated, and ' the plague will die and bo no more ' seen. But who is to rebuild Babylon and to rcpc6plc the land of the j Assyrians?" That question is now i apparently being answered in actual 'i deeds. Great European Powers arc c interesting themselves in the making ' of railways that will run down the c Euphrates Valley and form a link , in the shortest route, from Europe '. to India and Australasia. Commerce, agriculture, and cities are sure to { spring up beside the track. And i we shall sec whether that will be the ' end of the plague. . t