Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 2 of 7Thurston, Edgar
History
Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 2 of 7
Thurston, Edgar
Caste -- India, South; Ethnology -- India, South; India, South -- Social life and customs; Tribes -- India, South
are much more liable to the diseases than are the white races." During
the five years 1893-97, ninety-eight Eurasians suffering from filarial
diseases were admitted into the General Hospital, Madras.
To Colonel W. A. Lee, I.M.S., Superintendent of the Government Leper
Asylum, Madras, I am indebted for the following note on leprosy in its
relation to the Eurasian and European communities. "Europeans are by
no means immune to the disease, which, in the majority of instances,
is contracted by them through coitus with leprous individuals. Leprosy
is one of the endemic diseases of tropical and sub-tropical countries,
to the risk of contracting which Europeans who settle on the plains
of India, and their offspring from unions with the inhabitants of
the land, as well as the descendants of the latter, become exposed,
since, by the force of circumstances, they are thrown into intimate
contact with the Native population. The Eurasian community furnishes
a considerable number of lepers, and the disease, once introduced
into a family, has a tendency to attack several of its members, and
to reappear in successive generations, occasionally skipping one--a
feature akin to the biological phenomenon known as atavism, but of
perhaps doubtful analogy, for the possibility of a fresh infection
or inoculation has always to be borne in mind. There are numerous
instances of such hereditary transmission among the patients,
both Native and Eurasian, in the Leper Hospital. The spread of
the disease by contagion is slow, the most intimate contact even,
such as that between parent and child, often failing to effect
inoculation. Still there is much evidence in support of its being
inoculable by cohabitation, prolonged contact, wearing the same
clothing, sharing the dwelling, using the same cooking and eating
utensils, and even by arm-to-arm vaccination. Influenced by a belief in
the last mentioned cause, vaccination was formerly regarded with much
suspicion and dislike by Eurasians in Madras. But their apprehensions
on this score have abated since animal vaccine was substituted for the
humanised material. It has also for long been a popular belief among
the same class that the suckling of their infants by infected Native
wet-nurses is a common source of the disease. Attempts to reproduce
leprosy from supposed pure cultures of the leprosy bacillus have
invariably failed, and this strengthens the belief that the disease
would die out if sufferers from the tubercular or mixed forms were
segregated, and intermarriage with members of known leprous families
interdicted. Experience shows that, where such marriages are freely
entered into, a notable prevalence of the disease results, as at
Pondicherry for example, where the so-called creole population is
said to contain a large proportion of lepers from this cause."
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