similar vegetable sold as a tailor's chalk [jaboncillo de sastre], which was of more use for washing the hands than for modifying the nervous contractions of the muscles. Hence, the intrusions of the mediquillo and of the matandá (the old man) who with true enchantments and superstitious remedies cures the poor sick people, cannot be combated with efficacy. In Batangas dead flies that were killed by the fresh paint of a saint have been prescribed, and brick dust where the mark of a foot had appeared to the native curas as a miraculous thing imprinted by the Virgin who was coming to adore a cross near by. The pills of Holloway and the products of foreign charlatanism reap their harvest. Hence also, the poor parish priests have to serve as physicians and apothecaries in extreme cases. Very frequently the mediquillo when he sees that it is a case of exhaustion, absconds or disappears, and then what can a poor friar do at the bedside of a sick person who dies without human aid? Consequently, the literature of the convents has produced many [medical] works, some of them of merit, destined to be used as a vade mecum in these ordinary cases. Even notions of obstetrics (the science of childbirth) are given in some of those books, since there are theologues who counsel proceeding to the most risky operations in order to be able to baptize the fetus. In the Embriologia [i.e., Embriology] of Father Sanz, [148] one reads of cases truly inconceivable, and in the Ilustracion filipina, [149] a periodical which was published in our time, appeared articles in regard to the mediquillos and midwives, which by themselves alone would authorize a reform of those professions so interesting to humanity. In difficult childbirth it is very common for the operator to press down on the abdomen of the sick woman, and to have recourse to other proceedings similar to it. The first month after birth the Indian children pass in a perpetual martyrdom, for they are rubbed hourly with very hot cocoanut oil, a custom doubtless preserved from the woods, where in their savage state they make of the children a flexible serpent which escapes from the hand.