this city, several of them were ill with typhus. They were sent to the transfer prison, but there being no room to receive the new-comers, they had to lie all the night on the floor in the passages.[1] Equally bad accounts are given of the typhus epidemic in the Kursk, Penza, Tver, Tchembar, and several other prisons. In this last prison the typhus patients were kept together with all the others in the common rooms. The prison doctor, M. Jimsen, died from typhus.[2]
Private persons and societies for the aid of prisoners are prevented from doing anything to improve the food of the prisoners, and according to the paper Novaya Russ, the Minister of Justice has forbidden the prison authorities to give any information concerning the health of their inmates.
Mode of Transfer of Typhus Patients to an Infirmary.—The following statement, made by a lady in Central Russia and published in the Review Russkoye Bogatstvo, edited by Korolenko, is typical:—
"Last summer we were occasionally in the yard of the infirmary of our zemstvo. I saw two carts entering the yard, accompanied by soldiers. Approaching these carts, I saw that they contained typhoid patients who had been brought to the infirmary from the prison. It was a dreadful sight, and made my hair stand on end. One can hardly believe that in the twentieth century, with our present civilisation, men could be treated in such a way and brought in such a condition. The men, all unconscious, laid like logs in the cart, knocking their heads against its wooden frame. They had not even put a handful of straw under their heads. The men were lying almost one upon the other. Some were in the last agony; two of them died an hour or one and a half hours later. All of them were in chains. I saw how the two dead were carried to the chapel—both were fettered. I asked why the chains had not been taken from the dead; it would have been done if they were dogs. They replied that the chains can be taken off only after the death certificate has been signed by the prison doctor. Later on I learned that the typhus patients were kept in the very same room with the others. In our infirmary special rooms were prepared for the typhus prisoners, and warders were brought from the prison to watch them. Accustomed continually to beat the prisoners, these warders began to do the same in the infirmary, so that the zemstvo authorities had to interfere, but, I am afraid, in vain; they continued to do on a small scale what they had been used to do on a large scale in the prison."[3]
