The Administration of India from 1859-1868 Volume 1; The First Ten Years of Administration Under the Crown (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1869 Excerpt: ...such a pass, that the floor of the hospitals VOL. L O was covered with excreta, which were never removed. The stench became insupportable; the very punkah-ropes were saturated with what Mr. Sloggett, the chaplain, described as the concentrated smell of cholera; the smell, the filth, the disorder, the cries, groans, and shoutings in the dismal place, where the thermometer stood day and night at 100, formed altogether a combination of horrors amid which no man in rude health could be expected to live, and where the unfortunate patient was consigned to almost certain death under every external circumstance that could possibly aggravate the sufferings of men in the last extremity. The attendants, the comrades of the patients who were carried to this pest-iiouse, succumbed under the accumulated horrors, till at last the victims stricken with the disease were left too often untended at all; they were simply placed there to die. Nor can it be wondered at that men allowed the disease to reach an unmanageable stage before they incurred the risk of being consigned to such a place as this. At Delhi, and at Morar the cantonment adjacent to the city of Gwalior, matters were very little better than at Meean Meer. The latrines were in the same neglected condition, the hospitals were pest-houses, instead of asylums for the relief of suffering. The story reads more like an episode in some history of the Black Death two or three centuries ago, than a report of an occurrence in the nineteenth century, in a regiment of the British army. Although not connected with the administration of India, the more immediate subject of these pages, the great cyclone which visited Calcutta in the latter part of 1864 deserves a passing notice in a record of the time. The cyclone, or hurricane...