Focused on colonial South India, this article presents and assesses detailed archival records of public health measures in response to plague outbreaks between 1900 and 1947. Starting in 1897 in the Madras Presidency, the colonial government strictly implemented anti-plague measures and introduced various health schemes and medical policies for plague prevention. However, despite partly vigorous government efforts, plague outbreaks could not be fully controlled. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the plague remains among South Asia’s most feared epidemics, with an outbreak in Surat in 1994 causing major havoc. Neither indigenous knowledge nor Western medical systems provided fully effective remedies regarding causation, cure and prevention of plague epidemics. Since the article gained new relevance in light of current struggles faced by India’s public health system in handling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, some lessons from history emerge in the concluding discussion.

中文翻译：

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1900-47 年南印度殖民地的瘟疫死亡率和控制政策

本文着眼于殖民地南印度，呈现并评估了 1900 年至 1947 年间应对鼠疫爆发的公共卫生措施的详细档案记录。 从 1897 年马德拉斯总统任期开始，殖民政府严格执行抗鼠疫措施并推出各种健康计划和预防鼠疫的医疗政策。然而，尽管政府做出了部分积极的努力，瘟疫的爆发仍无法完全得到控制。在 20 和 21 世纪，鼠疫仍然是南亚最可怕的流行病之一，1994 年在苏拉特爆发，造成了重大破坏。无论是本土知识还是西方医疗系统，都没有提供关于鼠疫流行的病因、治疗和预防的完全有效的补救措施。