After seeing the forecastle I was taken to a little dark cell, an oblong den with a couple of bunks one on top of the other, located somewhere in the neighbourhood of the keel. There was no light or obvious means of ventilation, and barely standing room. There I found three men sitting on the lowermost bunk, all of them suffering from severe beriberi. One of them, I afterwards heard, died before morning; the others were sent to hospital just in time, I believe, to save their lives. The fact is that some of these epidemics of ship beriberi occurring in cold climates are fostered, though they may be not caused, by the artificial conditions which the ignorant lascars are allowed to bring about. They feel the cold of the English climate so much that, on entering British seas, they try to keep their quarters warm by lighting fires and stopping up ventilators. By these means they create a hot, steamy atmosphere and a sodden state of the place they live and sleep in, which is a very good imitation of the tropical conditions in which beriberi is prone to develop. Although such unhygienic conditions favour the occurrence of beriberi, they do not suffice to produce it; as is proved by the well-authenticated circumstance that the disease is very common in the European crews of Swedish and Norwegian ships, which, as compared to British ships, are in far better sanitary condition, and yet beriberi is comparatively rare in the latter.
Asylum beriberi.— Not very long ago, exactly similar conditions to those above described, and with similar results, were conduced to by similar circumstances in the Dublin lunatic asylum already alluded to. This asylum, built for 1,000 inmates, had 1,500 crowded into it. Anyone who knows what the atmosphere of even a well-regulated and not over-crowded dormitory in a lunatic asylum is like can imagine what it becomes in warm weather, when three patients are lodged in a place barely sufficient for two. The heat, the breath vapour condensed and streaming down the walls, the effluvia from the patients, the closed doors, the barred windows, the want of air, and the damp conspire to reproduce
