Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/536

520 520 APPENDIX the beginning of May to the end of September, every year, there are sent from Tiumento Tomskfloating prisons known as " barges," or " typhus-car- riers," and they bring to us, with unfailing promptness and regularity, the most perfect specimens of typhus that exist. In a nursery of contagious diseases that was built to accommodate 1600, but that holds, when neces- sary, just twice that number, these typhus specimens develop, of course, most satisfactorily. In the early spring this disease-nursery is not a nursery at all, it is a prison of the most common kind, and empty at that ; but no sooner does spring wave her perfumed wings — no sooner is the whistle of the steamer heard on the river — than the nursery begins to re- ceive the necessary material — the prison becomes reanimated. Week after week its population increases, and week after week its hospital, built to hold 150 patients, fills up. The more people there are in the prison, the more go into the hospital, until, at last, towards the end of September, when the steamers cease to whistle and the season of raw and cold weather comes on, this place of grief and lamentation appears in its true character as an anti-sanitary station and a nursery of contagious diseases. The prisoners' cells, crammed to suffocation, furnish precisely the environment that is needed for the perfect development of the charm- ing little creatures that the microscope has rendered visible. They de- velop without delay, and tens of prisoners go every day to the hospital. The latter contains 150 beds, and there are 400 sick. In order to accom- modate them all it is necessary to remove the beds and lay the patients on the floor. Some of them have to lie there without anything under them, because, for a quarter of them — that is, for 100 persons — there is not even bedding. . . . Imagine if you can this picture : You enter a large log building, through a very small entry or hall, and find yourself, at once, in a room filled with people lying on the floor. The gray mass is sighing, groaning, shrieking in delirium, and slowly suffocating in the oppressive, foul-smelling air. And this is called a hospital ! There are women with little babies — a mother sick with typhus fever and her infant with small- pox or scarlatina. Good God ! is it possible that all this must be so — that it cannot be otherwise ? These little children are not exiled by sentence of a court or " by the will of the commune " — these unfortunate wives are going into exile voluntarily with their unfortunate husbands. For what crime should they bear such suffering, and why should so many of them have to lay their bones in the earth of Tomsk ? Year after year all this is repeated over and over again. In the city of Tomsk 50 persons out of every 1000 die in the course of a year. In the forwarding prison 100 persons out of every 1000 die in the course of four months. For ten years past it has been demonstrated, and admitted, that the forwarding of exiles must be differently managed, or the prison must be enlarged. Hundreds of times it has been said, and written, that such a hospital kills people instead of curing them — and still everything goes on as of old, and the disease-nursery continues to turn out more and more complicated and