Missionary Travels and Researches in South AfricaLivingstone, David
Religion
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
Livingstone, David
Missions -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
Equally unknown is stone in the bladder and gravel. I never met with a
case, though the waters are often so strongly impregnated with sulphate
of lime that kettles quickly become incrusted internally with the salt;
and some of my patients, who were troubled with indigestion, believed
that their stomachs had got into the same condition. This freedom from
calculi would appear to be remarkable in the negro race, even in the
United States; for seldom indeed have the most famed lithotomists there
ever operated on a negro.
The diseases most prevalent are the following: pneumonia, produced
by sudden changes of temperature, and other inflammations, as of the
bowels, stomach, and pleura; rheumatism; disease of the heart--but these
become rare as the people adopt the European dress--various forms of
indigestion and ophthalmia; hooping-cough comes frequently; and every
year the period preceding the rains is marked by some sort of epidemic.
Sometimes it is general ophthalmia, resembling closely the Egyptian. In
another year it is a kind of diarrhoea, which nothing will cure until
there is a fall of rain, and any thing acts as a charm after that.
One year the epidemic period was marked by a disease which looked like
pneumonia, but had the peculiar symptom strongly developed of great pain
in the seventh cervical process. Many persons died of it, after being
in a comatose state for many hours or days before their decease. No
inspection of the body being ever allowed by these people, and the place
of sepulture being carefully concealed, I had to rest satisfied with
conjecture. Frequently the Bakwains buried their dead in the huts where
they died, for fear lest the witches (Baloi) should disinter their
friends, and use some part of the body in their fiendish arts. Scarcely
is the breath out of the body when the unfortunate patient is hurried
away to be buried. An ant-eater's hole is often selected, in order to
save the trouble of digging a grave. On two occasions while I was there
this hasty burial was followed by the return home of the men, who had
been buried alive, to their affrighted relatives. They had recovered,
while in their graves, from prolonged swoons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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