The Cholera

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 53, 22 October 1892, Page 2

The Cholera

HORRORS AT HAMBURG. "The cholera," writes our London cor- ! respondent, " is a great deal too close to us just now to be pleasant, and our medical and sanitary authorities are at last thoroughly on the gui vivc. A Vienna doctor who went to Hamburg to study the method in which this model city was tackhog the epidemic has sent Home a shocking picture. He states that the whole sanitary machinery is in the greatest disorder, and that everything has to be improvised. The transport of the sick is effected in sixty hired landaus, each conveying four patients, who are frequently in a dying condition. There are altogether 150 ambulance attendants, who generally wear their ordinary clothes inside of the oil-cloth garments advocated by specialists as a protection against the propagation of the disease. In the Eppendorf Hospital, where there are in all 800 patients suffering from various maladies, the number of doctors is absolutely inadequate, and the medical men available haye to strain every nerve to cope with the many cases requiring attention. The selfsacriffice displayed by them is worthy of the highest praise. Another drawback at the Eppendorf Hospital is that whenever cholera patients are brought in some of the ordinary cases of illness have to be removed. In one room the writer saw as many as 200 dead bodies. The epidemic, continues the letter, is raging in all the quarters of the city. At the outset every person seized succumbed, but now only 50 per cent die. Another doctor reports that furniture vans are being brought into requisition to carry away the dead, and that the whole hospital arrangements show all the confusion incidental to hasty and haphazard initiation. It is now intended to fit up the schools and gymnastic halls as hospitals. In a second letter the writer deals with the old Hamburg Hospital. The con* dition of things here is described as infinitely more horrible even than at the Eppendorf Hospital. In dirty, neglected passages bundles of clothing lie four or fire hours awaiting disinfection, and in the midst of these packages there are numbers of dead bodies, lam there anyhow in distressing confusion. The doors of the wards with which these corridors communicate are left wide open so that the sick can actually see the erer-growing numbers of the dead. To get into the wards themselves people have to step over the corpses and the piles of clothing. Nobody knows the number of sick and dead. The overcrowding in the wards is fearful In a room fitted up for thirty patients there are as many as sixty, and the sick he is such close proximity to one another that all nursing is rendered very difficult, Many rest on bare mattresses, which are filthy from use, and have no covering. For eyery forty to sixty patients tliere are but two attendants and one doctor. So absolute is the contusion that people who are not suffering from j the malady at all are brought into the i cholera wards, and there contract the disease. — Dunedin Star.