radiating out from this town the whole Mohammedan world in Western Asia would be attacked, and it would be hopeless to stem the course of the disease. How much better it would have been to stop infection at Seistan ! Fortunately, the pestilence did not this time spread farther west, but it might easily have done so, and then the Persian authorities and, above all, the priesthood, would have been to blame for the incalculable misfortunes which would have resulted.
The plague is less mysterious than cholera in its behaviour in so far that its propagation can be explained. If it is introduced into a family and seizes its victims, it does not leave the house till all the inmates are dead. Cholera, on the other hand, may attack and kill one member of a family and spare the rest. Cholera is more insidious and uncertain. As regards the plague, it is known that an absolutely isolated house can be protected, while all that dwell in the immediate neighbourhood of the sick are practically doomed. The spread of the disease can only be combated by the most energetic measures. In an infected house, or rather mud cabin, fuel should be strewn on the earthen floor and lighted. The mud walls can only be rendered safe by a heat of several hundred degrees. All clothes and household goods should be thrown into the fire, and thus the infection may be stamped out. With fire the spread of infection in the northern Seiyat villages had been successfully checked.
Captain Kelly had visited many plague-stricken persons. He said that the patients suffered fearful tortures, became apathetic and indifferent, and desired only to be left to die in peace. The parts of the body where the buboes break out are especially painful. If the bubo bursts in time the
patient may recover. But if the pus penetrates by an internal wound into the lymph glands and blood, death soon ensues. Pneumonic plague, that is the form of disease which attacks the lungs, is almost always fatal, because the microbes are there safe from the cells which destroy them. The doctor is more exposed to danger near such a patient than anywhere. All that is necessary to give him the disease is that the patient should cough and the smallest
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