Map of the Town of Lismore. Showing the places at which PLAGUE-infected Rodents were taken in 1905…..

Very rare map of Lismore made following the fifth outbreak of the plague in New South Wales in 1905. The map contains the following which are marked in red on the map

. Places at which plague rats were taken
. Places at which persons who had the plague were in employed
. Places at which persons who had the plague resided.

At right is an extensive table showing places at which, the first and last dates and places plague rats were taken.

The first case of the Bubonic Plague reported in Australia was that of Arthur Paine on 19 January 1900. He was a delivery man who worked at Central Wharf where the ship carrying infected rats would have docked. By the end of February, 30 cases had been reported and the government was concerned the colony was on the brink of an epidemic.

During the Hong Kong epidemic in 1894, the French and Japanese epidemiologists Alexander Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburo individually discovered the pathogen that causes the disease. Another French epidemiologist, Paul-Louis Simond, then proved during the 1896 plague outbreak in Bombay that fleas (Xenopsylla cheopsis) could act as vectors for transmission between rats.

However, this theory was not widely accepted by the medical community until the chief of the New South Wales Board of Health, John Ashburton Thompson, isolated the Y pestis bacterium in fleas on dead rats captured in Sydney. Ashburton Thompson’s reports were ‘models of cogent reasoning’ and his experiments were instrumental in changing public health methods around the world to combat bubonic plague.