Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/535

SIBEKIA 519 to the breaking- up of the roads by autumnal storms, has caused a particularly large accumulation of exiles this year in the Tomsk forwarding prison, and has had an extremely unfavorable influence upon its sanitary condition. Notwithstanding the removal of 700 exiles to the prison castle, and 200 to the building of the reform section, there are still more than 2400 in the forwarding prison, including 400 sick. It can be imagined how 2000 persons are crowded when they are put into eight one-story buildings, each thirty fathoms long and containing eighty-six cubic fathoms of air space, and all together intended to accommodate only 1200 to 1400 souls. The hospital is still more overcrowded. With a normal capacity of 150 it now contains 400 sick prisoners, who are lying- side by side on the floor, between the beds, and in all the corridors and passages. Many of them are not only without mattresses but without bedding of any kind. To this must be added, moreover, the fact that the surgeon sends to the hospital only prisoners who are so seriously ill that their well comrades have to carry them. Those who are still able to walk — although they may be in the incipient stages of typhus fever or some other disease — are left in their cells, simply because there is no possibility of accommodating all of the sick in the hospital. The overcrowding is already so great that the surgeon, in order to gain room, has been forced to remove all the beds from one ward and put the sick on the floor. The rate of mortality is very high, and Dr. Orzheshko 1 says that the deaths for October will probably reach 100. Typhus is the predominating disease, but it is accompanied by smallpox, diph- theria, measles, and scarlatina. Cases are not rare in which prisoners have typhus fever twice in succession ; and children have been known to take the infection first of typhus, then of smallpox, and finally of diphtheria or scarlatina. Contagion has saturated all the walls of the prison, and the harvest of death is reaped without mercy." In another part of the same paper the feuilletonist said : The Tomsk forwarding prison is a great nursery of contagious dis- eases. Typhus, of all sorts and species, smallpox, scarlet fever, and diph- theria, breed there so abundantly, and in such luxuriant forms, that it is a matter for surprise that we all — citizens of Tomsk — are not lying in the peaceful " God's Acre " that separates the city from this anti-sanitary sta- tion. The prison increases by one hundred per cent, the city's mortality, and gives Tomsk the reputation of killing her people without pity. From i The prison surgeon.