Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1884 — PLAGUE’S PICTURE [ARTICLE]

PLAGUE’S PICTURE

Drawn by a Visitor to the Cholera-In* fected Districts of Marseilles. The Air Laden with Gases from Streams Reeking in the Foulest Filth. A special cable dispatch from Marseille? to the New York Times gives a graphic narrative of scenes and incidents of the cholera district by an eye-witness. It says: Passing along the narrow and squalid Rue Caisserie, over oue-half the shops were seen to be closed at every crossing. From a tenemeut region on the hi.l above a stream of fetid water flowed across the street and pluuged down a precipitous descent on the other side through dark lanes crowded with towering rookeries swarming below with idle men and children playing in the filthy gutters, the women meanwhile swashing the water about with their brooms, under, the evident impression that they were cleaning something. Each glimpse of any one of these streets is enough to turn tha stomach of any healthy man. The smell through all this quarter, in which during a space of twenty minutes we met three laden hearses, was bad enough, but the smell was indescribably worse when we had driven across town to two of the most afflicted quarters of all Marseilles—Cnpelette and the adjoining quarter. In order to reach them we crossed the old Bhip canal, which was filled to the brim with reeking water and had its surface thickly covered with garbage and refuse of a decidedly miscellaneous and revolting kind. Finally we got on a street known as Toulon road, a wide thoroughfare without a shade-tree. Its gutters ran rivulets of drab-colored water which had overflown from the canal where it was dammed now and then by heaps of rotting vegetables or worse substances, including dead cats and dogs. Four out of every five houses were found closed. Those which remained open were mainly estamiuets, where, under dirty awnings and on dirty sidewalks, men and women sat drinking, or were already reduced to stupor by previous drinking, and junk-shops in which filthy people wero sorting rotten rags in au unspeakably vile atmosphere. Festering filth was around them, and a tropical sun beat fiercely down upon the scene, blinding the eyes as its rays were reflected from the White road, across which in the Quartior Capeletto courses a stream the size of a mam sewer in New York, winding its way uncovered among the houses on its journey to the sea. The stream was laden with the sewage of the vilest of the Marseilles quarters—Capelette and the adjoining —which have furnished much ' over one-half of the deaths that have occurred at Marseilles, and it is an interesting fact that the largest proportion of them were Italians. The wharfs all along the water front were found to be crowded with quarantine shipping, most Italian and French, and picturesque sights were the Mediterranean sailors, among whom were many negroes, lying about in the shade. At the beginning nineteen-twentieths of the patients received at the Pharo failed to recover. For the last fortnight matters have so far improved that only two-thirds of those received have died. This excessive mortality at first was largely due to the fact that most cases when received developed into a hopeless condition. The highest number that have been in the hospital at any one time is 110, and the largest number reoeived in any one day is thirty-seven. There are two chief doctors. The treatment, both here and at Toulon, in the first s ages, is twenty drops of laudanum with three grains of other, with ice in the mouth to stop the vomiting. In the second stages the patients become very cold. From ten to fifteen grammes of acetate of ammonia, the same quantity of alcohol, and two injections of morphia are given daily. If the patient can not breathe, artificial respiration of oxygen is produced and the limbs are rubbed with turpentine. Ihe third stage is the coffin. Delay iu placing the bodies in the coffins is made necessary by the fact that violent post-mortem action of the limbs takes place, caused by n terrible reaction after death, in which the temperature rises from extreme cold at dissolution to 120 after it.

Of many pathetic sights the most painful that I saw occurred in the female ward, where one room was mostly occupied by children. A nun held in her arms by an open window a dying babe 18 months old. Its three sisters (the oldest being only 10 Jears) lay on beds near by their parents, oth of whom died the same day, and there was small hope for any of the remaining children save the oldest. A dozen children in all were to be seen here, some of them in a state of recovery. Late at night I drove with my courier outside the city to the Cemetery St. Pierre to see the burial of the three patients whom I had observed in the Pharo hospital in the afternoon. After a brief burial service, intoned by a pale young priest who looked badly scared, three boxes were hurriedly lowered into a trench eight feet deep by twenty feet long, and a goodly quantity of lime was shoveled on top. It was a ghastly trench and there was plenty of room for more coffins. It was a weird and saddening sight. There stood the tall white houses. The dead still wore their tawdry trinkets, and the whole was lighted up as in a picture by Rembrandt by the fitful glare of three lanterns. Those gaping trenches were big enough to hold their thousands. A concierge showed me a burial permit. Across the face of the document was written: “Cholera—urgent,” and there was a requisition for some disinfectant. The same correspondent visited Toulon, and thus depicts what he witnessed: If in a sanitary sense the condition of Marseilles was frightful, that of Toulon struck me as simply murderous. Although Toulon has a background of mountains, the city itself is situated on a flat plain, four feet only above the level of a tideless sea. The consequences arising from imperfect drainage, with a natural want of slope, are that the sewers have only a fall of eighteen inches; so, with a sluggish movement, the filth of the town drops into an almost stagnant sea. What is worse is that at the points where these drains flow they are only covered with plank, aud the filth, disgusting to the nose, impresses itself on the eyes. You not only then smell but you see the public garbage of Toulon. Just fancy people living in this city of quite 80,000 inhabitants without the faintest glimmer of common sense in regard to common hygiene 1 Toulon must be inhabited by people who utterly ignore every precaution which health requires. Their habits both in their houses and in the public streets are indescribably filthy. The plain English of it is about this: That it is impossible for people who live on fruit, who drink all kinds of poor fluids, who sleep in dirt and nastiness, who breathe an air polluted by the sewage of the town itself, and rendered doubly poisonous by excreta leffby the training-Bhips, to escape cholera. Dubino the last six months there haw been sixty-two suicides in San Francisco.