Note 4 — CHAPTER 9

I have in other parts of my work touched upon this terrific scourge, from which it will be seen that it is well known throughout India under the same appellation; and it is not one of the least curious results of my endeavour to prove that the Hindus had historical documents, that by their means I am enabled to trace this disease ravaging India nearly two centuries ago. At Vol. II. p. 1022 it is thus described in the Annals of Marwar: “This, the sakha (putting a garrison to the sword) of Sojat, was when S. 1737 ended, and S. 1738, or A.D. 1681-2, commenced, when the sword and Mari (pestilence) united to clear the land.” Orme, in his Fragments [ed. 1782, p. 200], mentions a similar disease in A.D. 1684, raging in the peninsula of India, and sweeping off five hundred daily in the imperial camp at Goa; and again, in the Annals of Mewār, Vol. I. p. 454, it is described in the most frightful colours, as ravaging that country twenty years before, or in S. 1717 (A.D. 1661); so that in the space of twenty years, we have it described in the peninsula, in the desert of India, and in the plains of Central India; and what will appear not the least singular part of the history of this distemper, so analogous to the present date, about the intermediate time of these extreme periods, that is about A.D. 1669, a similar disease was raging in England. I have no doubt that other traces of the disorder may appear in the chronicles of their bards, or in Muhammadan writers, judging from these incidental notices, which might never have attracted attention had not Mari come to our own doors. I have had many patients dying about me, but no man ever dreamed of contagion; to propagate which opinion, and scare us from all the sympathies of life, without proof absolutely demonstrative, is, to say the least, highly censurable. There is enough of self in this land of ultra civilisation, without drawing a cordon sanitaire round every individual. The Udaipur prince was the first person seized with the disease in that capital: a proof to me, against all the faculty, that to other causes than personal communication its influence must be ascribed. I will not repeat the treatment in this case (see p. 1002), which may deserve notice, though prescribed by the uninitiated.