Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/532

516 was very defective, as this portion of the city was not supplied by the city water company. Well-water was therefore used for drinking and cooking purposes; while for washing, rain-water was caught either in cisterns or hogsheads. The water for culinary use was obtained from three sources. The houses g, h, i, c, and d obtained water from the well t; the houses a, b, k, from the well v; while the people in houses e and f crossed the road and patronized the well at s. This was the customary manner of supplying their wants. The source of supply at s was cut off during a short time, but, as this incident gave a clew to one of the most interesting facts of the investigation, I shall consign it to a later period of the narrative for the sake of what the critics call the dramatic unities.

Assuming that the details of the locality are sufficiently clear to enable the reader to understand the different steps of the search, I shall give at once the marches and halts of the fever in its invasion, and the amount of damage it inflicted on the population of our intra-mural hamlet.

As the reader knows, Otto Schmidt was taken sick on the 8th of September, and, as we have given him all the importance that belonged to him individually, I shall designate the other cases by the letters indicating the different houses. On the 4th of October a young woman was taken sick in the house g, the only case in a family of four; six days later the first case occurred in c, a family specially afflicted, as here four persons were stricken, leaving but two of the family, girls aged ten and fourteen years, untouched. These four cases were taken sick in the following order—the 10th, 14th, and 23d of the month; on the 20th and 26th we have two other cases in the house d, and two cases, at intervals of eight and twelve days later, in the house h, near neighbors of the Schmidts. In the house f, at nearly the same time, a case of the fever occurred. The last family attacked resided at e, and here the disease seemed to linger with special animosity, the first person being attacked on October 28th, and the last on November 8th. At this place and date the disease expended its force. In Otto Schmidt's family there were two additional cases taken on the 16th and 20th of October. In the total there were seventeen cases; five were very light, what some authors have called "walking cases." In the remaining twelve cases there were three deaths, one from an intercurrent pneumonia, or lung inflammation, one from intestinal hæmorrhage, and the other, without any special complication, gave way before the onslaught of the poison.

In an investigation of the kind before us we must have a knowledge of all the circumstances, and therefore, even at the risk of weaving such a complicated array of events around this drama of disease that it may need the skill of a professional novelist to disentangle us from the meshes, we must glance for a moment at the condition of the weather during at least the early part of the outbreak. From about the