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SIBERIA

rible suffocation, the filth, the dampness, etc. The prisoners have no laundry, and therefore they either wash their underclothing in their cells, or wear it for three or four weeks without washing. In the water-closets it is actually necessary to fight for a place, since for every such place there are a hundred or more prisoners. In view of these facts it is not surprising that the prison hospital now contains 200 patients sick with typhus in one form or another, and that twenty or thirty more are added daily to its lists. Even the prison attendants take the disease, and two overseers have already died of it. It is a matter for surprise that the prison authorities, with more than 300 sick on their hands, content themselves with the two prison doctors, instead of calling in outside physicians as they have done in previous years. However, in Áchinsk the condition of things is still worse. There they have only one prison doctor.

—Newspaper Vostóchnoe Obozrénie, No. 3, p. 6. St. Petersburg, Jan. 22, 1887.


Scurvy constituted 16.5 per cent. of all the sickness in the Krasnoyársk prison in 1886, 10.8 per cent. in 1887, and 11.6 per cent. in 1888. Typhus fever constituted 12.2 per cent. in the same prison in 1888.

—Rep's of Chf. Pris. Adm. for years indicated, pp. 222, 292, 293, and 317.


THE NÉRCHINSK PRISON.

The year 1884 has left Nérchinsk quite an inheritance of undesirable things, and among them contagious disease. Typhus fever, which first made its appearance in November, is now widely prevalent. The nursery of the contagion is that same old prison, famous for its filth, rottenness, and suffocating air. Four men died of typhus in it at the close of the year, and the overcrowding was such as to compel the authorities to remove all the women into another building hired for the purpose. From the prison and the prison hospital the disease was earned by the soldiers of the guard to the local command, where, out of twenty-five men sick, ten have typhus fever. The warden of the prison and the hospital steward are also down with the disease. General Barabásh, governor of the Trans-Baikál, inspected the prison on the 30th of December as he passed through here on his way to the Amúr, and was astounded by its hygienic condition.

—Newspaper Sibírskaya Gazéta, No. 7, p. 169. Tomsk, February 17, 1885.


Scurvy constituted 23.6 per cent. of all the sickness in the Nérchinsk prison in 1886. —Rep. of Chf. Pris. Adm. for 1886, p. 223.