Abstract
Plague, so far as its recent pandemic
occurrence is concerned, although of more than
ten years duration in India, still continues to occupy a place of primary importance, not so much "by reason of the numbers it kills,- for the "fevers" and
cholera are more active in this respect,- as for the
suddenness of its appearance, the extent of its range
the rapidity of its diffusion and its want of amenability to treatment. But there is yet another reason for
my choice of subject leading me to refer particularly
to this disease and it is that a small but what might
be called, a smart epidemic of the dread disease broke
out recently in a town within the "ilaka" or jurisdiction of the district of Nadia, shortly before my arrival, and in the management and suppression of which I had a good deal to do. The outbreak was illustrative
of many features now thoroughly well recognised in the
epidemiology of the disease and it was full of interest from the point of view of sanitarian and epidemiologist alike. A brief account of the outbreak will be
included in this work and it will, I trust, prove of
some interest. The way in which it was kept under control and prevented from extending over a large area,
which it had many facilities for doing, in fact "the
manner in which it wan hemmed in, within the municipal
limits of the town where it started, show what energetic measures can do, if adopted on a sound and scientific basis and promptly carried out in practice.
