Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Steamships, Accidents, Disease, Sanitation

    Relates how 'the boiler of the Mont Blanc, the largest paddle-steamer on Lake Geneva, exploded at Ouchy [....] The saloon was full of ladies and children taking lunch when this boiler-plate swept them in mangled heaps to the stern. It was deadlier than a broadside, for it was followed by a rush of suffocating steam' (113). Reports the outbreak of cholera in Eastern Russia, and notes that 'It is a curious illustration of the blind folly of the popular masses in a frenzy that in order to check the cholera they kill the doctors, and throw disinfectants into the river by way of protests against the plague'. Warns that although 'we expect a comparative immunity from its ravages [...] with 2,000 cases of scarlet fever in a single week in London we cannot plume ourselves too much upon our sanitary position'. (115)