SHOCKING DEATHS FROM SMALLPOX.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2672, 12 October 1881, Page 3

SHOCKING DEATHS FROM SMALLPOX.

A lamentable story is reported from Horth Warn borough, a village in the northern disvision of Hampshire. After a week’s illness, a Mr Charles Lovegrove succumbed to smallpox. On the following day his wife died from the same disease. The only attendant on the sufferers was their son, a joung

man ahent 20 years old, who it appears had unknowingly taken the disease home. Daring their illness the father and mother were lying in the same bed, bat on the death of the father the mother was removed by her eon to another room, where she died. So terrified were the neighbors that the undertaker placed the coffins in the garden and left. Unable to get them upstairs, the bewildered son brought down the corpses of his parents and pjneed them in their coffins in the garden. Two men then came with a horse and cart and conveyed the bodies to their last resting place. In another account of the case, the correspondent says : The mother died in the afternoon, and was buried at eleven the same night. I believe that the parish doctor was away for his holiday, and that bis locum tenens, doubtless for some sufficient reason, did not visit them. The parish priest was also away and the deceased received no religious consolation in their last moments. In fact, they were shunned by all. At the burial the beadle or sexton refused to hold the lantern to enable the clergyman to read the service, or come near the coffin, and the light had to be held by a mutual friend and the minister. The burial took place without any certificate of death having been given.