Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1894 — PEST HOUSE CROWDED. [ARTICLE]

PEST HOUSE CROWDED.

A Most Serious Condition Affairs Exists in Chicago. One hundred and twenty-six new cases was the small-pax record in Chicago for the last week as shown by the books jnt the Health Department. Twenty-five of these were reported on Friday;, twenty-three on Saturday. Eleven, had I een discovered up to ”4 o’clock Sunday., and the department declares the disease is still spreading. One hundred and eighty-six patients, says a dispatch, are in the pest house, several are in the “suspect" ward of the County Hospital, and a number are ! quarantined in private houses because ' there is no room in the city's hospital, | No more women or children will be re- i moved' from infected houses unless 1 some extra provision is made for their care. The Department of Health, by its officials and inspectors, declares itself unable to meet the emergency' and prevent the further spread of the disease unless fnrther facilities are provided lat once and the people of the wards most affected co-operate in reporting naw ca-es as soon as they arise.

The most serious condition of affairt has been found jjn the southwest portion of the city, enpcc.ally in the Ninth and Tenth Wardi Dr. M. Brand, the inspector, found three persons dead in their houses Sunday, and two similar cases on Saturday. The people living in the houses had concealed the existence of smallpox until death came and they were compelled to call in the undertaker. He notified the Health Department and Dr. Brand was sent to investigate. Went to School and to Church. “It would not be well to give the addresses,” said the doctor wnen he was asked about them, “but they were.in families where the people had been passing in and out, the children going to school, the family attending church and going about as if small-pox were an every-day affair. That seems to be nothing extraordinary, either. I have had a number of cases where the first word we had of them was from the undertaker. Generally we find one or two new cases in the house with the dead body, but the isolation of such cases is not enough to stop the trouble, JjecjusQ wg are called in alter the harm has been done. *• 4 “Another thing, and the most serious obstacle, is the opposition to vaccina tion. The Poles especially seem to re. gat d inoculation with fear as a thing to be dreaded. It is next to impossible to persuade the residents of the district to protect themselves and their neighbor from contagion. As a result the condition of things here is serious and something’ought to be done at once if they aae not to be worse. “Here is an. example of the way the disease is scattered: I was called in to. examine a patient in a house. I found a little girl already dead, another sister in the first stages, and the father, who was a butcher, attending to his shop every day. There had been no attempt to isolate him. He sold fresh meat to hundreds of people in that neighborhood, and it will be . strange if some of them do not come down sick. To make matters worse, the sanitary conditions in the district are very bad. Not an alley in the Ninth or Tenth Ward is paved, and almost all of them are filled with trash.”