the hospital; dirty and lice-infested tenants would be escorted to baths, and dirty flats would be qualified for disinfection.
The reality, however, was somewhat different. Shortly after 5 in the morning, Order Service officers came to such tenements and locked the entrance gates. Next, they contacted the House Committee and, for a pre-arranged fee, allowing the House Committee to take all infected people out of the premises before the sanitary column arrived (the fee was based upon the wealth of the tenement). On the outside, this was done in the following way: police went from flat to flat, calling everyone to come down into the yard to go to the bath. The police were followed by a member of the House Committee, who warned families that the sick should be taken out of the house immediately. Gruesome scenes ensued: patients with typhus were led through a crowd gathered in the courtyard. They were often seriously ill, with complications to their brains and lungs. Since the steamings were held in the cold season, patients often paid for such trips with severe complications and even death.
When most patients were out of the tenement house, the Order Service officers proceeded to the second part of their task, namely bathing. Since only the dirty and lice-infested were to be bathed (read: those who could not pay), it was done in a very simple way. The police in the yard caught a handful of weak, ragged beggars swollen with hunger, and triumphantly led them through the streets to the bathhouse, while others were freed from this obligation thanks to a certain amount, paid to the police by the House Committee.
[4] About 7 a.m., the sanitary brigade arrived along with the brigade head. They also went in the first place not to the flats, but to the House Committee, where, again depending on the wealth of the tenement house, brigade members agreed for a certain sum not to hurt people too severely. If there were an ill rich man with severe complications in the building and he could not be led out in time, the brigade set up their headquarters in that person’s flat, which ensured complete exemption from the consequences of the brigade doctor’s report. The brigade doctor arrived about eight o'clock, and, accompanied by a member of the House Committee, he did a round of all flats, qualifying the dirty ones for disinfection and the clean ones for exemption. This qualification was largely dependent on the amount of money which the disinfection brigade received.
If a case of typhoid fever were diagnosed in a flat, the sanitary doctor usually submitted a report of infectious disease to the hands of one of
