THE BLACK DEATH.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 962, 4 March 1911, Page 2

THE BLACK DEATH.

St. Petersburg, March 2

According to Japanese accounts there have been 10,000 deaths Irom plague at Kwang-cheng-tse, and 7000 bodies have been burnt. Twenty thousand rats, taken from infected areas, have not revealed plague bacillus.

A terrible picture of the cholera districts in Russia is drawn by a correspondent of the Daily Chronicle (London). Black horror is brooding over thousands of square miles of territory, where peasants are dying like flies under conditions brought about by their own ignorance and superstition. The streets and houses have been plastered with instructions to the people to drink no unboiled water, wash often, avoid the excessive use of alcohol, and prevent fouling of the streets, but the doctors find that they are fighting against an almost universal failure to observe the most elementary laws of sanitation. The sovereign remedy is “ holy water,” and this is taken from the ordinary wells and streams by*the peasant priests and distributed without being filtered or boiled. The liquid often is reeking with dirt and disease, but it is used as though it were a precious disinfectant. ‘‘One may see the unhappy people in the churches,” writes the correspondent, “ crossing themselves with it, washing in it, drinking it. If someone gets ill he drinks it as medicine. It is sprayed on the walls and floors, and even upon babies as they sleep at night. The peasants fear the cholera not so much because they might die a loathsome and painful death, but because the holy rites of the Church burial will be denied them after death. It is not allowed to take the infected bodies into the churches, and the dead are taken and buried in remote places. To be denied the pomp of burial and to be shut outside the ancestral graveyards is to go evidently post haste to hell.” It has been a common occurrence for doctors to be attacked with scythes and spades when they have attempted to remove cholera patients to the hospitals, and the authorities have failed almost completely to cope with the awful visitation.