Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
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Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
Small-pox is dreaded, and infected persons often cruelly shunned: a
suspicion of this or of cholera frequently emptying a village or town
in a night. Vaccination has been introduced by Dr. Pearson, and it is
much practised by Dr. Campbell; it being eagerly sought. Cholera is
scarcely known at Dorjiling, and when it has been imported thither
has never spread. Disease is very rare amongst the Lepchas; and
ophthalmic, elephantiasis, and leprosy, the scourges of hot climates,
are rarely known. Goitre prevails,* [May not the use of the head
instead of the shoulder-strap in carrying loads be a predisposing
cause of goitre, by inducing congestion of the laryngeal vessels?
The Lepcha is certainly far more free from this disease than any of
the tribes of E. Nepal I have mixed with, and he is both more idle
and less addicted to the head-strap as a porter. I have seen it to be
almost universal in some villages of Bhoteeas, where the head-strap
alone is used in carrying in both summer and winter crops; as also
amongst the salt-traders, or rather those families who carry the salt
from the passes to the Nepalese villages, and who very frequently
have no shoulder-straps, but invariably head-bands. I am far from
attributing all goitre, even in the mountains, to this practice, but
I think it is proved, that the disease is most prevalent in the
mountainous regions of both the old and new world, and that in these
the practice of supporting enormous loads by the cervical muscles is
frequent. It is also found in the Himalayan sheep and goats which
accompany the salt-traders, and whose loads are supported in
ascending, by a band passing under the throat.] though not so
conspicuously as amongst. Bhoteeas, Bhotanese, and others. Rheumatism
is frequent, and intermittent fevers, with ague; also violent and
often fatal remittents, almost invariably induced by sleeping in the
hot valleys, especially at the beginning and end of the rains.
The European complaints of liver and bowel disease are all but
unknown. Death is regarded with horror. The dead are burnt or buried,
sometimes both; much depending on custom and position. Omens are
sought in the entrails of fowls, etc., and other vestiges of their
savage origin are still preserved, though now gradually disappearing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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