1887-1903
131
COLONIAL REPORTS.
-ANNUAL.
9
getting on board the steamer only to collapse utterly on gaining the wharf or the gangway under the scrutinising gaze of the police. The anxious expression worn on the faces of the sufferers---too sure an indication of the disease lurking within---led to the detection of the majority; few managed to evade the watchful and experienced eye of the police; fewer, if any, reached their destination alive. Such painful details cannot fail to arouse one's deepest sympathy with the unfortunate sufferers, but the force of circumstances was too strong and the law of necessity too inexorable to admit of indulgence to mere feelings of sentiment and pity at such a time.
As regards the nature of the terrible disease which worked such havoc in our midst, much valuable information is contained in Dr. Lowson's carefully prepared and interesting report on the subject, which I had the honour to forward to Lord Ripon recently. I do not therefore propose to trespass on what is purely medical ground beyond referring to the very valuable discovery of the plague bacillus by Professor Aoyama and Dr. Kitasato, of the Japanese Medical Mission which visited Hong Kong for the purpose of studying the disease. Both these gentlemen conducted their researches with a steady and patient devotion that cannot but command admiration and gratitude, and it was only fitting that their untiring and unselfish efforts in the interests of science should meet with a richly-deserved success. It was an unkind fate that destined Professor Aoyama to have a passive as well as a practical experience of the disease, but that he made a satisfactory recovery under an enlightened treatment of the disease must add considerably to the value of the knowledge which he and his colleague have given to the world.
Experience of the plague has not unnaturally dispelled much of its mystery and robbed it of many of its initial horrors. We now know, thanks to the valuable discovery referred to above, that the disease is caused by a bacillus or plague-germ in the blood, that that germ thrives in a temperature ranging from 60° to 90°, that it is abundantly found in filthy matter of all sorts, and that its great enemy is the sun. We have also a knowledge of the pre-disposing and generating conditions, of the period of incubation (which ranges from six to nine days), and of the extent to which it is contagious under healthy conditions. With this valuable information which has been acquired at such a terrible cost, it is earnestly to be hoped that science will ere long devise some safeguard in the form of inoculation or otherwise against this disease, as against others.
It was a noticeable feature in the recent epidemic that, whereas only some 18 per cent. on an average of the patients of Eastern extraction recovered, 82 per cent. of the Europeans who were attacked survived. The difference may, of course, be attributable to the fact that the latter cases were carefully treated from the first, whilst many of the former were admitted to hospital in a moribund condition or in such an advanced state of the disease as to render recovery almost hopeless, but, taken with the fact that