Note and Comment

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 16, 1902

THE St. Paul Globe recently made the following note of the “appalling death roll of 1902:” —

Few people realize how frightful have been the ravages of 1902 by disease and disaster. Only a little more than ten months of the twelve are gone, and yet close to a million persons have been swept across the Styx by epidemics, floods, and volcanoes.

Early in May a series of eruptions in Martinique and neighboring islands in the Caribbean Sea snuffed out countless thousands of lives.

Somewhat later the Yellow River of China overflowed its banks, and tens of thousands of Celestials were drowned like rats in a trap.

Not in forty years has there been such an epidemic of cholera as for the past six months has been raging like a prairie fire in Egypt, Japan, China, and the Philippines. Official reports show that the disease has been no respecter of persons, but has raged with equal virulence in the slums of Canton and Shanghai and among those of royal blood in Peking. Neither did the pestilence break out in one town and spread to another. It appears to have broken out almost in the same hour in Manchuria, Shen-si, and half a dozen other provinces, and is now frightfully fatal in almost every section of China. The busiest men in Japan have been the undertakers, and how dreadful has been the mortality from the disease in the Philippine Archipelago is shown by the reports made to this government by American officials stationed there. Though the statistics have been kept imperfectly,—in some sections not at all,—the loss by the disease has easily been six hundred thousand people since the opening of the year.

And now comes the news that an epidemic of measles is sweeping over western Europe, and has already crossed Behring Sea into Alaska. Thousands have already died, particularly in Kamchatka, and the living are so worn out with caring for the sick that they are in most cases themselves fit subjects for the hospital.

Since this was written, news has come of a wide-spread famine in Finland, and thousands have perished from a volcanic eruption in Guatemala.