[A correspondent writing from Delhi on April 30 gives a realise tic picture of the medical relief given during the plague epidemic at Delhi.)
Imagine for a moment that London has been visited by some violent epidemic disease. There are no infectious diseases hospitals and no system of notification. The health authorities invite people to be inoculated, but the uneducated are frightened, while the respectable are opposed to it on religious grounds. The only people who are prepared to undergo the ordeal are the masters and boys of Westminster School. After a time as the disease grows worse, the district visitors of a South London parish open relief work for the city. The only help they can get is from Westminster School, as no one else has been inoculate ed, so the masters and boys set off round the town with baskets of medicine and hunt out the sick. Every now and then they persuade a crowd of men to be inoculated, and an L.C.C. doctor comes down, with a clerk and a bucket, and inoculates on the pavement free of charge. In one borough a local friendly society distributes milk. The L.C.C. feels unable to provide isolation facilities, but gives its moral encouragement to a committee of city merchants and lawyers to raise money and pass resolutions. Nothing much comes of this, but after a time, under pressure from the district visitors and the Westminster masters, the L.C.C. bestow an approving smile on the formation of another committee, which raises another sum of money and passes more resolutions. The committee, however, gets to business and erects a few thatched huts
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.