Small-Pox And Measles Passed
Through The Country About Twenty Years Ago, And Committed Great Ravages;
But, Though The Former Has Since Broken Out On The Coast Repeatedly,
Neither Disease Has Since Traveled Inland.
For small-pox,
the natives employed, in some parts, inoculation in the forehead
with some animal deposit; in other
Parts, they employed
the matter of the small-pox itself; and in one village they seem
to have selected a virulent case for the matter used in the operation,
for nearly all the village was swept off by the disease
in a malignant confluent form. Where the idea came from I can not conceive.
It was practiced by the Bakwains at a time when they had no intercourse,
direct or indirect, with the southern missionaries. They all adopt readily
the use of vaccine virus when it is brought within their reach.
A certain loathsome disease, which decimates the North American Indians,
and threatens extirpation to the South Sea Islanders,
dies out in the interior of Africa without the aid of medicine;
and the Bangwaketse, who brought it from the west coast,
lost it when they came into their own land southwest of Kolobeng.
It seems incapable of permanence in any form in persons of pure African blood
any where in the centre of the country. In persons of mixed blood
it is otherwise; and the virulence of the secondary symptoms seemed to be,
in all the cases that came under my care, in exact proportion
to the greater or less amount of European blood in the patient.
Among the Corannas and Griquas of mixed breed it produces the same ravages
as in Europe; among half-blood Portuguese it is equally frightful
in its inroads on the system; but in the pure Negro of the central parts
it is quite incapable of permanence.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 206 of 1070
Words from 59448 to 59752
of 306638
