Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/113

Rh characters the name of the prisoner's disease and the date of his admission to the hospital. The most common disorders seemed to be scurvy, typhus fever, typhoid fever, acute bronchitis, rheumatism, and syphilis. Prisoners suffering from malignant typhus fever were isolated in a single ward; but with this exception no attempt apparently had been made to group the patients in classes according to the nature of their diseases. Women were separated from the men, and that was all. Never before in my life had I seen faces so white, haggard, and ghastly as those that lay on the gray pillows in these hospital cells. The patients, both men and women, seemed to be not only desperately sick, but hopeless and heart-broken. I could not wonder at it. As I breathed that heavy, stifling atmosphere, poisoned with the breaths of syphilitic and fever-stricken patients, loaded and saturated with the odor of excrement, disease germs, exhalations from unclean human bodies, and foulness inconceivable, it seemed to me that over the hospital doors should be written, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

After we had gone through the women's lying-in ward and the ward occupied by patients suffering from malignant typhus fever, I told the smatrítel that I had seen enough; all I wanted was to get out of doors where I could once more breathe. He conducted us to the dispensary on the ground floor, offered us alcoholic stimulants, and suggested that we allow ourselves to be sprayed with carbolic acid and water. We probably had not been in the prison long enough, he said, to take any infection; but we were unaccustomed to prison air, the hospital was in bad condition, we had visited the malignant typhus fever ward, and he thought the measure that he suggested was nothing more than a proper precaution. We of course assented, and were copiously sprayed from head to foot with