Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/538

522 522 APPENDIX From this official report it appears that in the fall of 1887 there were 3000 exiles in the Tomsk forwarding prison, with adequate room for less than 1500 ; that 520 of them were sick at one time, with hospital beds for only 276 ; that most of the patients lay on the hospital floor as usual ; and that a large number of sick, for whom there was not even hospital-floor space, remained in the prison kdmeras, spreading iufectiou among the well, and particu- larly among the children. 1 The prison, apparently, was not so changed and improved as to be unrecognizable in 1888, for the chief of the prison administration reported, at the end of that year, that 2059 exiles had gone into the prison hospital, and that 24 per cent, of them were sick with typhus fever. [Rep. of Pris. Adm. for 1888, pp. 55 and 293. Ministry of Interior, St. Petersburg, 1890.] There had evidently been no change in the prison buildings, for the Siberian Messenger declared, at the end of the year, that most of the kdmeras in the forwarding prison. . . are impossibly cold, damp and dark, and are more like stalls in a barn than human habi- tations. It is time, at last, that some attention were paid to this state of things. . . . The bad construction of the kdmeras is one of the princi- pal reasons for the great amount of sickness among the prisoners. It is well known that typhus fever and other diseases prevail there without intermission. — Russian Gazette, No. 28, Moscow, Jan. 28, 1889. There is some uncertainty as to the time when Mr. de Windt first visited the Tomsk forwarding prison and failed to recognize it from my description ; but the exact time does not matter, since there is plenty of evidence to show that, when he wrote his letters to the Pall Mall Gazette, the Tomsk forwarding prison was still the same institution that the Tomsk Messenger called a " nursery of contagious diseases," and that acting- Governor Petukhof de- scribed to me as " the worst prison in Siberia." In my first letter to the Pall Mall Gazette [p. 513 of this appendix] I quoted the state- ments of the Siberian Messenger with regard to the terrible con- dition of affairs in the forwarding prison in August, 1889. In 1890— last year— Mr. Galkine Wrasskoy, chief of the Russian prison administration, published a review of the operations of his department, for the first decade of its existence, and caused it to be translated into French for the information of the dele- iRep. of the Med. Dept., pp. 201-207. Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, 188 J.