Medicine: Black Death

Brahmin women with diamonds in their noses and caste marks on their brows hastened decorously into Calcutta’s criminal court last week. Their tawny husbands and friends, in Indian pantaloons or European trousers, packed along the walls. There they heard the public prosecutor declare that the murder of rich Amarendra by his stepbrother Benoyendra Pande and three doctors was “an unparalleled act of diabolic ingenuity.”

The 70-year-old aunt of Amarendra told what she had seen and heard of the murder. The stepbrothers, she said, were co-heirs to a large estate. But Benoyendra was envious and impatient for the heritage. He insured Amarendra’s life for $20,000, stipulating that in case of death the insurance company was not to look into its manner or cause. Immediately thereafter intrigue mounted rapidly. Benoyendra set Drs. Bhattacharya, Bhattacharyee and Dhar to “ransacking all India” for a subtle poison with which to kill Amarendra. The conspirators acquired a store of tetanus germs. Benoyendra smeared the tetanus germs on the nose piece of a pair of spectacles and with firm solicitude jammed them on Amarendra’s face. Amarendra contracted tetanus, sinusitis, other ills. But prayers and medicine saved his life that time.

Next the conspirators acquired a dish of plague germs from the Bombay Municipal Hospital. They tried the potency of the germs on white rats. Benoyendra watched the rats die within 24 hours. His heritage seemed almost within reach.

Amarendra was standing in the Calcutta railway station. “A short, black man with an oval face brushed against him,” his aged aunt recounted last week from the witness stand in the Calcutta court. Amarendra felt a hypodermic needle pierce his arm. Before the sting had died away, Benoyendra dashed up and massaged the arm. Amarendra quickly developed a high fever, his arm pits and groins swelled, his face puffed, his tongue blackened, and he died, Calcutta’s first victim of bubonic plague in five years.

Bubonic plague is called the Black Death because its victims become a spotted dusky red. The disease compares with cholera as an Asiatic peril. It is transmitted by a germ which is carried by a flea from rats to man. The death rate is 80%. An infection of the blood stream, the disease runs its fatal course in a week or less, with high fever and great pain. Persons may be inoculated against bubonic plague. The use of serum in the first few hours of the disease reduces the mortality rate to 25%.

Endemic in China, India, Arabia and California, the Black Death killed 60,000,000 people in the 14th and 15th Centuries. In 1665 it devastated London, was graphically described by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year.