[
    {
        "id": 207306,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1975",
        "page_number": 74,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "66\n\nE. G. PRYOR\n\nSuch wild speculation may well have created a fatalistic attitude to the inevitability of the plague as a natural phenomenon and consequently limited an awareness of the need to search in other directions. However, the desperate need to find a solution prompted a considerable amount of inquiry and reflection by a number of independent observers and some of these researchers deserve a fuller mention.\n\nDr. Gomes da Silva, the Principal Medical Officer of Macau gave an account of the disease which affected the Portuguese colony in 1895. He records that during a visit to Canton he had observed a strange disease that attacked \"only Chinese ..... and rats\" and that the same disease spread from Hong Kong to Macau in 1895. In drawing attention to the association of the plague with rats Dr. da Silva also described the general sanitary condition of Canton which he concluded was a further causal factor. He records that house refuse was usually thrown into the streets where it accumulated until such time as the torrential summer rains and the overflow of the Pearl River cleared it away. However, between May and September 1894 it did not rain to any great extent with the consequence that large quantities of rubbish accumulated and reached an advanced state of putrefaction. These conditions were paralleled by outbreaks of plague. Conversely, Dr. da Silva observed that when the summer rains were early and abundant the disease seldom occurred.\n\nIt is now not difficult to establish the chain of events that must have occurred, namely that during prolonged dry spells when refuse piled up in the streets colonies of rats thrived on the nourishment so carelessly provided. As the rats multiplied, so did the fleas and from but one source of infection carried by the fleas the disease spread like a forest fire first through the population of rats and then to homo-sapiens.\n\nHowever, amidst the wild speculation of how the disease was communicated to man scientific researches undertaken by Alexandre Yersin in Hong Kong established in June 1894 that the bacillus, pasteurella pestis, was the direct cause of plague. This was subsequently confirmed by two Japanese doctors, Professors Kitasato and Aoyama, who were also pursuing researches in the colony. Conclusive evidence was obtained by injecting animals with a virus preparation. Notwithstanding, the means of transmission of the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213088,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1993",
        "page_number": 156,
        "title": "RAS-1993",
        "content_text": "137\n\ndirector of the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Japan, arrived in Hong Kong with two assistants, Drs. Aoyama and Ishiyumi on June 12th. They were taken around the next day. On June 14th, Lowson wrote 'Kitasato discovered bacillus.' The following is quoted from a report in the Hong Kong Weekly Press dated July 15th on an address given by Kitasato: 'In the first day he was able to discover the bacillus in the bubo, lungs, liver and spleen of dead patients and he immediately made a culture in agar agar. On the same day he took with all due precaution some blood from the finger tips of patients suffering from the disease in a severe form and again found the bacillus. He then inoculated mice, guinea pigs and rabbits with the virus and in every instance the animals so inoculated displayed the symptoms of the disease and died.' Kitasato worked in a matshed within the Kennedy Town Hospital compound and made his discovery there. Following the discovery a telegram was sent immediately to the medical journal, the Lancet; later a full-length report was dispatched on July 10th. Both Aoyama and Ishiyumi contracted the disease, the former from nicking his finger while doing an autopsy. He survived to write a paper entitled “On the Plague Epidemic in Hong Kong in the years 1894 to 1895”.\n\nThe bacillus was also discovered by the French bacteriologist, Dr. Alexandre Yersin of Saigon's Pasteur Institute, who arrived in Hong Kong on June 15th. A few days later, he too found the bacillus. Lowson wrote on June 23rd: 'Got microscopes again out. Yersin got his bacillus.' Lowson later added that Yersin refused to work in the same matshed with Kitasato and it took a few days to erect another for him. Yersin reported and sent material back to the Pasteur Institute in Paris. After close scrutiny of the findings of both Kitasato and Yersin in their published papers by independent observers, doubt was cast on Kitasato's bacillus. The difference in the characteristics between his and Yersin's bacillus is highly technical and need not concern us. In the end, Yersin's was regarded as the real discovery, and the generic name given to the plague and allied organisms is subsequently Yersinia in his honour. To complete the story, although both of them knew that dead rats found in infected areas died of plague, they were unaware of the part played by fleas, which was discovered later by the Indian Plague Investigation Committee and others in the Indian Epidemic, about 1906-1908.\n\nThis then is an account of the situation as it developed in the first few months of the Epidemic as related in Lowson's diary. In several entries",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302",
        "rank": 0
    }
]