Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1876 — Devastation of a Village in India by the Cholera. [ARTICLE]

Devastation of a Village in India by the Cholera.

The Bombay Gazette describes as follows a calamity which has fallen on a village in India through the ravages of cholera* One of the dark spots in Indian village life is the periodical visitation of gome epidemic which enters almost every hovel and carries off one or more of the occupants. The villagers may have been living happily together, their minds perplexed about nothing more serious than the state of their crops, their cattle, or the ordinary gossip of their little community, when suddenly the destroyer appears, and the scene instantaneously cliapges from peacefulness into terror and confusion. A sad instance of this fact has occurred in this presidency within the last few days. Where there was once a thriving pleasant village situated on the sea shore, there is now a deserted collection of huts. Not a human sound is to be heard in the place from morn till night. Most of the inhabitants are dead, the victims of a terribly sudden invasion of cholera, and the survivors have left everything in their huts and fled to the adjoining mountains. It is one of tint most alarming and we might almost say awful visitations which we know of in the history of any village in this presidency. Golwood, the place we are referring to, is midway between Bombay and Surat, and on the Bombay, Baroda & Central India railway. Being close to tire sea, the officers of the company have hitherto looked upon it as a kind of sanitarium, as it possessed many of the advantages enjoyed by Tbeethul and Bulsar, the recognized sanatoria of Guzerat. Here the guards of the goods trains used to change, and many of them had their residences near the station. Altogether the population of Golwood could not be more than 200. Last week cholera, which is now preying around Ah. medabad, suddenly entered the village, and slew victims right and left. On the 4th inst., the first day of its appearance, no fewer than fifty-seven people out of the small population died; on the next day twenty-three died; twenty more died on the 6th; and when we had our last advices from Golwood there were eighteen new cases, of which three-fourths were hopeless. ’Jhe few survivors and every poor wretch who could move have fled to the adjacent hills, where they are now, huddled together and struggling to exist on soeh food as they can find in that barren localily. Such was the terror and helplessness of the people when the outbreak occurred that they aid not bury their dead, and bodies Jay rotting in the streets for two whole days, during which the stench was abominable. No reason for the outbreak has been assigned, and the fate of Golwood furnishes one more instance of the mysterious movements of cholera. The misery of the people was aggravated by the fact that there was no doctor at hand. A Mr. H. B. 'Wharton, permanent way inspector on the B. B. &C. L line, has a house close to the village, and when the epidemic appeared the people ran to him for help. He was the only European in the station, and they naturally thought the

takib might be Able to help them. He happened to have a small supply of cholera mixture and chlorodyne, out it was soon exhausted among so many applicants, and Mr. Wharton could do nothing but listen (helplessly while the tales of death were being told him op every side by panic-stricken people. Mr. Wharton saw that the cholera was the most virulentjie had ever seen in the course of a long experience. He saw people die within thirty minutes of the momentof attack. The village was filled with lamentations, and natives lushed wildly hither and thither. Many people died in the streets; while running away they were seized with the pangs of the disease, and dropped on the spot and soon expired.