LEPROSY (_Vukavuka_ or _Sakuka_)[95]
No less than one per cent. of the native population of Fiji are lepers,
and, if native tradition is to be believed, the decay of customary law
has not affected the people in this respect either for better or for
worse. All the old men are familiar with the disease; they can diagnose
it with surprising accuracy; and they generally concur in stating that
it has neither spread nor decreased since heathen times.
The history of leprosy in the Pacific is remarkable. The Maoris have had
the disease ever since their arrival in New Zealand--certainly not less
than four centuries ago;[96] with the Fijians it is ancient enough to
have taken its place in their mythology. In Hawaii, on the other hand,
it seems to have been unknown before 1848, in New Caledonia before 1865,
and in the Loyalty Group before 1882.[97] It is impossible to speak with
certainty about the other groups, because the early voyagers did not
stay long enough to make accurate observations, and were prone to
mistake the disfigurements of scrofula and syphilis for the symptoms of
leprosy; the naval surgeons of the last century were generally men of
inferior attainments; and the missionaries, traders, and runaway sailors
who had the opportunity for leaving valuable information regarding
native diseases did not possess the necessary medical knowledge.
Moerenhout, who wrote in 1837, is the first to make undeniable reference
to it. In enumerating the diseases of the Society Islanders, he gives
an excellent description of the symptoms of leprosy under the native
name _Hobi_, which is identical with _Supe_[98] (H and B being
interchangeable with S and P), the Samoan term for leprosy, without a
suspicion of the real nature of the disease he was describing. It may,
therefore, be assumed that leprosy was endemic in Tahiti and the
adjacent islands long before the arrival of Europeans. Native tradition
seems to indicate that it was so in Tonga, and its history in islands
into which it has been recently introduced suggests that it was not a
recent arrival in any of the Polynesian groups except Hawaii. For,
whereas in Tahiti, New Zealand and Fiji it is no commoner now than it
was a century ago, in Hawaii it has increased so rapidly that in forty
years after its introduction it had infected one in every thirty of the
native population; in New Caledonia in twenty years it had infected
4000; and in the Loyalty Islands six years of the disease in Mare alone
had produced seventy lepers. If the other Polynesian groups had been
virgin soil the crop of lepers should have been no less fruitful.
Among the Maoris, with whom it was formerly common, it has now died out.
Their traditions relate that among the immigrants who arrived from
Hawaiki in the canoe _Tuwhenua_ there was a leper who infected all his
companions. They landed at Te Waka Tuwhenua (Cape Rodney), a little to
the south of Whangarei, and scattered among the immigrants of the Tainui
and Ngapuhi parties. Leprosy is still called Tuwhenua in the Whangarei
district, but whether the disease was called after the canoe, or the
canoe after the disease, it is difficult now to determine. In other
districts it is called Puhipuhi and Ngerengere.
[Pageheader: LEPROSY IN ANCIENT TIMES]
The fact that leprosy was endemic among some branches of the
Malayo-Polynesian stock would be another argument, if any other were
needed, for tracing it to a Western rather than an American origin, for
we may infer from the silence of the Spanish historians, that leprosy
was unknown among the aborigines of the American continent. The
primitive home of the disease was Asia and North Africa, and there is
negative evidence that it was introduced into Europe somewhere between
400 and 345 b.c., in the fact that Hippocrates barely mentions the
subject, and that Aristotle is the first to give an unequivocal
description of the disease. On the other hand, the frequent allusions in
the oldest Chinese, Syrian and Egyptian writings to a disease bearing
all the marked characteristics of leprosy, seem to show that it was as
common in the East in times of remote antiquity as it is at the present
day. The Roman conquests carried it far and wide through Europe, until
it became so terrible a scourge that nearly all the European states of
the Middle Ages were driven to enact stringent laws for the segregation
of lepers, which so far fulfilled their object that after the fourteenth
century, when leprosy had touched its culminating point, it began to
decline. The last British leper died in Shetland in 1798, and, though
indigenous lepers are still occasionally met with in most of the
countries of Southern Europe, the disease is extinct in all the northern
states except Norway, where there were still 11,000 known lepers in
1890.
Though there are lepers in Iceland, in the Aleutian peninsula and in
Kamschkatka, leprosy may be said to be a disease of tropical and
subtropical countries. With the exception of a few insignificant
islands, no country in the tropic zone seems to be entirely free from
it. In India--the only large country in which accurate statistics have
been taken--the proportion of lepers to the total population is
estimated at 5 to 10,000, though errors of diagnosis and concealment
have doubtless combined to make the estimate merely approximate. In
China, judging from the numbers observed in the southern treaty ports,
the proportion is probably higher, but both fall far short of the Fijian
figure of one per cent., and the Hawaiian of one in thirty.
Nothing was known of the specific cause of leprosy until 1874, when
Armauer Hansen isolated the _Bacillus leprae_, a discovery which has
cleared the way for formulating precise ideas on the subjects of
heredity and contagion, and the proper treatment of the leper as a
public danger.
It is, of course, impossible for any organism, however small, to create
itself _de novo_. It must come from some pre-existing germ whose habitat
may be earth, air, water, beast or man, and since leprosy has never been
found in any animal except man, nor in any virgin country to which a
human leper has not had access, and since the arrival of a leper in such
a country is followed by an outbreak of leprosy among those who have
associated with him, there is little room for doubt that man acquires
the germ of the _Bacillus leprae_ from man, and not from other animals,
nor from local or climatic conditions. The most ancient, and, as it now
turns out, the most correct belief, was that leprosy is contagious; the
leper was unclean. Driven out from the society of men, he was compelled
under heavy penalties to warn wayfarers of his approach by voice or
bell. In comparatively recent times the belief arose that leprosy was
hereditary, and even that it could be acquired from the soil of certain
countries. The latter belief has been disproved absolutely by the
behaviour of leprosy when introduced into virgin countries. The
hereditary theory is also on the wane, although the Indian Commission on
leprosy in the early nineties did not absolutely disprove it. If leprosy
be hereditary, how explain the striking fact brought out by Hansen, the
discoverer of the bacillus, that of the numerous offspring of 160
Norwegian lepers who emigrated to America none have developed the
disease, or again the equally well-attested fact that children sometimes
become lepers first, and their parents afterwards. Another strong
argument against heredity is to be found in the fact that lepers become
sterile at an early stage of the disease; unless, therefore, leprosy
finds recruits in some other way than by heredity, the disease would
inevitably die out in one or at the most in two generations. Moreover,
leprosy is often developed quite late in life, and if the germ had been
received into the system at birth, one would have to suppose that it had
remained latent for thirty, forty, or even seventy years, a circumstance
without parallel in pathology. In one respect, however, leprosy, like
tubercle, is hereditary; that is to say, it often shows a preference for
the members of a single family, whose constitutions have some
predisposing family characteristic, and who are living together,
breathing the same air, and eating the same food.
[Pageheader: LEPROSY NOT HEREDITARY]
The opinion of students of the disease is now almost universal--that
leprosy is communicated by contagion, and by contagion alone, though it
has not yet been determined how the contagion is communicated. Very few
of the nurses and doctors in leper asylums acquire the disease, and,
except in one doubtful instance, every attempt to inoculate man and the
lower animals with the _Bacillus leprae_ has failed. It may be that the
leper-germ is sterile except in certain phases of the disease, and that
only in favourable conditions in the recipient's health, combined with
intimate contact with the leper, can the disease take hold.
Modern opinion, therefore, holds that leprosy is contagious, and, in a
sense, hereditary also in so far as it tends to cling about certain
families whose members show a constitutional readiness to receive it. I
have dwelt upon this opinion at some length in order to show that this
is precisely the view which the Fijians themselves take of the disease.
A man is said to come of a _kawa ni vukavuka_ (leprosy-stock), which
implies no disgrace except among the highest families, and if he
develops the disease his misfortune is regarded as one of the family
traits as inevitable as the shape of his nose. At the same time he is
believed to have the power of infecting others (not necessarily by
actual contagion), and he was generally made to live alone or with other
lepers, at a distance from the village. In Tonga the contagious nature
of leprosy was fully recognized, and the lepers were isolated on
separate islets or uninhabited parts of the larger islands. It is there
a grave breach of good manners to apply the word leprosy (_kilia_) to
any one in polite society, and many ingenious shifts are resorted to in
order to express the meaning without using the word. In the session of
the native parliament of 1891, when a member of the upper house was
discovered to be suffering from the disease, and a resolution to assign
an island to him as asylum was passed, I covered myself with shame by
unwittingly pronouncing the forbidden word after other speakers had been
skirmishing round it for fully half-an-hour after this fashion--"Havea's
friends were pining for him at home, and therefore it was but right that
he should be excused further attendance at the house; nay, more, to the
westward lay many delightful little islands which Havea was longing to
visit, where his every wish would be gratified, and where--well--the
prevailing wind would blow pleasantly from them to him, and he would be
supremely happy."
The Fijians are no exception to other primitive races in believing that
neither death nor disease can overtake a man naturally. Their first
reflection on seeing the condition of the patient is, "An enemy hath
done this!" their second, that the enemy must be discovered and
punished, and his malignity neutralized by counterspells. It is not a
logical theory of infection, because in their simple creed it is
generally not necessary that the infecting agent should himself be
suffering from the disease. But in the case of leprosy, as in their laws
for the sexual abstinence of parents and for securing the sanitation of
villages, they arrive at right conclusions from wrong premises. Leprosy,
they argue, is inherent in certain families, therefore the evil spirit
of leprosy, which is their equivalent for contagion, is a sort of family
retainer, ever obsequious to the commands of his hereditary masters.
And, since a living spirit must live somewhere, certain stones in
various parts of the country are pointed out as his shrines, and are
hedged about with a tabu that is never in danger of infraction, inasmuch
as to touch them is to meet Gehazi's fate. The existence of these stones
was discovered by Dr. Bolton Glanvill Corney, C.M.G., the Chief Medical
Officer of Fiji, who is not only the principal authority on all medical
questions in the Pacific Islands, but has a very accurate knowledge of
the Fijian language and character. He has visited and described the
stones himself, and has elicited from their owners on the spot such
traditions concerning them as they still remembered or cared to tell.
[Pageheader: STONES THAT IMPART LEPROSY]
Until within the last few years there were three leper stones on the
river island of Tonga near the mouth of the Rewa river. One, called
Katalewe, was vested in a family called Navokai, now living at Navasa
village, but formerly of Nankavoka (the Skull), a deserted entrenchment
that lies back from the river-bank behind the present site of Mbulu
village. Two miles distant is a second stone, called Toralangi, who is
said to be still _in situ_, though Dr. Corney did not actually see him.
The third stone, known as Ratu, was missing from his former position,
the cleft between two buttresses of a _ndawa_ tree, and, although to the
consternation of the native bystanders Dr. Corney was bold enough to dig
up the ground in the hope of unearthing him, he was not to be found.
This is the less to be regretted since Ratu was a peculiarly active
little stone. When the Notho warriors were storming Nankavoka village,
one of them unwittingly dropped his _masi_, which lighted upon Ratu. It
is said that he became a leper in consequence. The leper woman Mereani,
wife of the chief of Navasa, who had her plantation within a few yards
of Ratu, is said to have acquired the disease by working in his
neighbourhood.
Katalewe was described to Dr. Corney as having been (for he exists no
more) "about the size of a large orange or small shaddock, very round
and smooth, ash-coloured, homogeneous in substance, and unlike any other
stones in the neighbourhood," which, being soft alluvium deposited on
old mangrove swamps, is singularly free from stones. So potent was he
that the creeping stems of plants withered or turned aside as soon as
they came within the radius of his poison, and a patch of ground
surrounding him, about the size of a sponge-bath, was always destitute
of vegetation. None knew whence he came. As long as tradition ran he had
been vested in the Navokai family, now extinct but for Karolaini, a
married woman about forty years of age, living at Lukia. This woman told
Dr. Corney that her father, Totokea, long since dead, was a leper, and
that she developed the disease in childhood. She had lost all the
phalanges of three of the toes of her left foot, and had besides an
extensive patch of anaesthetic skin on the right thigh. A "wise woman" of
Bureitu had treated her for leprosy, and she had observed tabus on and
off for some years. By the time she was old enough to marry the disease
had ceased to make any advance; the stumps of the toes were healed; she
could walk without lameness; and the patch on the thigh had begun to
regain its natural colour. After marriage there was no return of the
disease. Dr. Corney examined her, and found sensation to be perfect all
over the patch, and the left foot perfectly sound except for the loss of
the toes. She was quite convinced that her leprosy was hereditary, and
did not result from contagion, and that she would have died of it but
for the ministrations of the "wise woman" of Bureitu. She had two
children (the eldest about nine when Dr. Corney saw them), and both were
healthy.
[Pageheader: THE CURSE OF KATALEWE]
Katalewe's owner (_taukei ni vatu_), that is to say, the senior member
of the Navokai family, could harness the power of the stone to his own
needs if he had an enemy to injure, or to his own profit if other people
had enemies and were willing to pay for his services. It was not
necessary that the doomed person should himself be made to touch
Katalewe; it was enough if the victim's clothing, or hair, or scraps of
food he had been eating were laid against the stone with suitable
prayers by the _taukei ni vatu_. The victim would then develop leprosy,
but the mode of operation was not the same with all the leprosy stones,
as will presently appear. It remains to relate the fate of Katalewe, who
has now lost all power to harm. There came to Mbulu a pious enthusiast
to represent the Wesleyan Church, a certain Sayasi, a native of another
village. "Hors de l'eglise; point de salut," was his motto, and,
Katalewe's natural protectors having died out in the direct line, he
laid violent hands upon the unprotected stone, and carried him home in
derision for his wife to use like a paper-weight for keeping down the
mats she was plaiting. When not in use he was thrown with the other
weights into the fire hearth, where he fell a prey to the consuming
element and crumbled away to powder among the yam-pots. He did not leave
the indignity unpunished. The poor iconoclast not long afterwards had
his mind racked by the indiscretions of his wife, divorced her, and
found himself ostracized by his fellow-pastors in consequence, and
finally, a broken man, he relinquished his cure, and returned to his
native village, where death soon afterwards put an end to his
sufferings. From this tragic story one fact is patent--that Katalewe was
made of limestone, and since there are but two kinds of limestone in
Fiji, coral and dolomite, and coral would have been immediately
recognized by the people of Tonga village, it is evident that Katalewe
must have been a fragment of dolomite washed down from the head-waters
of the Rewa river, and polished smooth by the action of the water. A
stone so unusual in the delta would naturally be an object of remark; it
might be taken to decorate the grave of a dead leper, and, when time had
obliterated all other traces of the grave, tradition would still cling
about the stone--the one feature of the forgotten grave that would
survive to catch the eye of successive generations. As the graves of
ancestors are the vested property of their descendants, so the leper
stone, and together with the Djinn that was believed to inhabit it,
would belong to the seed of the original leper for ever.
In Noikoro, near the chief village of Korolevu, almost in the centre of
the great island of Vitilevu, Dr. Corney found another leprosy stone,
called simply Na Vatu-ni-Sakuka (the Leper-stone), a large basaltic rock
having upon it natural markings in which the natives see a resemblance
to the leprous _maculae_ on the human skin. Among the Vunavunga people to
whom it belonged, and who formerly lived near to it, there are several
bad cases of leprosy. The stone was vested formerly in one Mbativusi
(Cat-tooth), a leper, but on his death it passed into the hands of
Rasambasamba, his _vasu_, _e.g._ a man whose mother belonged to
Mbativusi's family, and to his children. Their family is called
Nakavindi, and the elder of the Nakavindi family, being _ex officio_
proprietor of the stone, is held to have the power of conferring leprosy
upon whom he wishes. His dreadful powers are, of course, invoked
secretly: the offended person comes to him with a root of _yankona_,
whale's teeth, bark-cloth, or mats, praying him to impart the disease to
his enemy. The leper-priest lays them on the stone with incantations
(_veivatonaki_) for a successful issue. Then, returning home, he drinks
_yankona_, and in blowing the dregs from his lips and moustache, cries
as his toast--"_Phya! Uthu i au!_" which, being interpreted, is "Phya!
May his face be as mine!" _i.e._ leprous; and speculation would run high
as to who was the object of the curse. When the curse failed there was,
as in all similar public impositions, an easy way out. No doubt Elijah
slew the priests of Baal because he knew that in five minutes they would
have been ready with a plausible excuse for their failure to call down
fire from heaven. The leper-priest could always plead the inadequacy of
the offering (which, of course, became his perquisite), and ask for
more, or decline to make a second trial. All the leading men of the
Nakavindi family, which, be it remembered, is only a collateral branch
of the original proprietors of the stone, have leprosy in its most
terrible form.
Dr. Corney found another leper stone lying in the silt of a small
stream, Nasova creek, about a mile and a half from the village of
Nankia, in the Sawakasa district. Part of its surface was rough, and the
smooth portion was interrupted with three ripplings or corrugations
which the natives called _vakalawarikoso_. The village where the family
to which the stone belonged was living proved to be a leprous centre
from which the disease appeared to be radiating to the other villages in
the neighbourhood. As this stone appears to have neither history nor
malign influence, it is possible that it owes its name to its macular
markings and its situation near a leprous centre.
[Pageheader: A GRISLY STORY]
Near Wala, a village about three miles from Fort Carnarvon on the
opposite bank of the Singatoka river, is another stone, or rather
collection of stones, for they are described as forming a miniature
cairn of red stones like jade. As the cairn stands within the
burial-ground of part of the Wala village, it may be actually a grave.
The natives are very reticent about it; I lived for more than a year in
almost daily intercourse with the Wala without hearing of it, and Dr.
Corney, who went to see it after hearing of it from the Mbuli of the
district, was adroitly put off the scent by his native guides. He
learned its history under somewhat dramatic circumstances. Being called
one day to examine a number of native prisoners recently admitted to the
prison in Suva, he found that one of four lepers among them gave Wala as
his native village. With the permission of the Superintendent of
Prisons, he took the young man to the hospital in order to question him
at leisure, and there, with the unknown terrors of prison discipline
before his eyes, his reticence gave way. The gist of his replies to Dr.
Corney's questions as taken down at the time was as follows:--"My name
is Namanka; I come from Wala, but my family belongs properly to Talatala
in Vaturu. They left Talatala in heathen times when Vaturu was burned
out by the enemy, and took refuge at Sambeto, but my father and mother
fled to the hills and settled at Wala, where we have lived ever since. I
have one brother older than myself, and he, my father, and my mother are
all lepers. My father was Kuruwankato; he died a few months ago at
Keyasi, whither he had gone for treatment for leprosy. His hands were
withered and contracted, there were ulcers and blisters upon them, he
had lost his fingers and toes, and had patches upon him that had lost
all feeling. He had no brothers; I have no uncles, and no leprous
relations except my father, mother and brother. My father was the first
to show symptoms. This was the way of it. On a certain day, several
years ago, we all went out into our plantation, and left the house
empty. Not even a child was left to keep the house. I was but a small
boy at the time, but I often accompanied my parents to the plantation.
When we returned in the evening we saw that the Sakuka (the Leprosy) had
crossed our threshold. He had entered by the end door, and had crawled
to the hearth, and there in the ashes of the hearth we saw the prints of
his hands and his feet, the prints of leper hands (_mains-en-griffe_)
and toeless feet like hoofs. Thus we knew that the Sakuka had put his
mark upon our house, and wondered which of us was to be the first. We
knew that we should be lepers, being thus marked for it by the Sakuka,
and my father was the first, my mother next, and I was last of all. The
Sakuka is a stone, red like a patch of leprosy, red like red paint. It
is in five or six pieces, heaped together. Sometimes a piece is missing
from its place at Navau. I have been at the burial-ground myself when a
piece was missing, and have seen that it was so. Vasukeyasi is
proprietor of the stone; he is not a leper, but Kaliova, who also has a
vested right in it, is. Vasukeyasi is priest of the stone, and he can
move it to infect a person with leprosy, and so compass his death. I do
not know what forms or ceremonies he uses when he would do this, but it
is a sort of _kaitha_ (witchcraft). When I said that the Sakuka marked
our hearth I meant the spirit of the stone which is obedient to
Vasukeyasi. The thing is true; there is no doubt about it. I do not know
the origin of the stone; it is an ancient institution. I have told you
all that I know about it."
In this grisly story we have the essence of the belief in leper stones.
The cairn of strange red stones set up in a burial-ground can be none
other than a tomb, probably the tomb of a leper. The spirit of the dead
man haunts the site of the grave, and his eldest descendant is his
priest. His priest can conjure him forth in corporeal shape to crawl
into the house of a person whom he has foredoomed to leprosy. This, of
course, is no explanation of the _main-en-griffe_ in the ashes on the
hearth. That episode may have been a coincidence or it may have been a
lie; but that a family of healthy aliens came to live in the
neighbourhood of a leper stone, and were infected one after the other by
means which every native believed to be the malignant ministrations of
the priest, was indubitable fact. And if we smile at his theory of
infection, let us remember that it is logical reasoning as compared with
our own in his eyes, and that he can point to more lepers in support of
his plan of infection by incantation than we can adduce as the result of
inoculation with the _bacillus leprae_.
Dr. Corney heard of two other leper stones--one at Navitiviti in the
Mbure district, Ra province; the other near Mbukuya, fifteen miles north
of Fort Carnarvon. There may be others in Vanualevu and elsewhere.
[Pageheader: DROPSY STONES]
Two instances of stones sacred to other diseases have been met with by
Dr. Corney. One of these is situated near Narokovuaka, on the Wainimbuka
branch of the Rewa river, and the other in the Tonga district, the home
of Katalewe, the leper stone. They are both called _vatu-ni-bukete-vatu_
(dropsy stones). Abdominal dropsy is generally termed _mbukete wai_
(water pregnancy), but when very tense it becomes _mbukete vatu_ (stone
pregnancy). The latter term is also applied to abdominal tumour, which,
though a rare disease among the Fijians, is occasionally met with. In
neither case does the stone appear to take an active part in imparting
the disease to which it is sacred. Probably it was the menhir of some
chief who died of the disease, or some fancied similarity to the
symptoms of the disease was noticed in its shape.
It must not be supposed that the natives as a whole have as matured a
theory to account for the dissemination of disease as might be gathered
from the foregoing account of the leper stones. Few of them have turned
their thoughts to the subject; even the youth who described the visit of
the "Sakuka" had not speculated upon what motive the proprietor of the
stone could have had in letting loose his horrible familiar upon the
unoffending family. His reasoning went no further than this: that they
had leprosy, and he supposed that it was the leper stone that did it. It
was only when Dr. Corney asked the question that the youth remembered
that the leper-priest had the power of conferring the disease, and that
he thought of connecting the fact with his own case. So with the doom
that overtook the iconoclast teacher; the natives related his
destruction of Katalewe and his subsequent fate as totally unconnected
episodes. The occult powers of Katalewe were so much a commonplace of
their lives that, when Dr. Corney translated his notes to them, they
were astonished that any one should think it worth while to collect the
scattered fragments of information they had given him into a connected
narrative.
It is, therefore, scarcely correct to say that they hold decided views
upon the manner in which leprosy is transmitted. Most of them would say
that they had never thought about it, and if pressed for an opinion,
would point to its prevalence in certain families as a reason for
thinking it hereditary. Natives of places where there are leper stones
believe it to be the heirloom of the family connected with the stone, or
the work of the leper-priest when the disease appears in other families
for the first time. But among the coast tribes there seems to be a
strong suspicion that lepers breed contagion, since in many districts
lepers are compelled to live by themselves in the bush. This has long
been the belief of the Tongans, and it is possible that Tongan
immigrants have impressed their views upon Fijians, since it is more
marked in the Lau Islands, where the Tongan influence is strongest.
A painful case came to my notice in 1887 at Lakemba. A leper had been
driven out into the bush, and his wife had been in the habit of taking
food to him daily. Her relations, having failed to dissuade her from
what they regarded as a practice dangerous to themselves, told her at
last that she must choose between their society and his, for that if she
persisted in visiting a leper, she would be debarred from ever returning
to the village, but must live thenceforth in the woods like a wild
animal. The poor woman refused to abandon her husband, and the relations
came to me to ask whether she could not be legally restrained from thus
cutting herself off from all that makes life worth living to a native.
She was brought before me, and as soon as I had satisfied myself that
she was acting of her own free-will I forbade any one to interfere with
her liberty of action. The husband was described as suffering from
nodular leprosy. He had been isolated, not from horror at his
appearance, for men afflicted with lupus in as revolting a form were
allowed to live in the village, but from fear of contagion.
In places where isolation is usual lepers conceal their condition as
long as possible, and it is not uncommon to hear that so-and-so is
strongly suspected of leprosy because he will never take off his shirt
to work, and avoids bathing in company.
[Pageheader: LEPERS IN ISOLATION]
There are, as most people know, two kinds of leprosy, nerve and
nodular. Nerve leprosy is manifested by patches of discoloration on the
skin in which all sensation is destroyed, and the Fijians suffer so much
from scrofulous affections that this symptom may be easily passed over.
Nor is nerve leprosy, at any rate in its early stages, revolting in
appearance. Nodular leprosy, on the other hand, which often attacks the
face, and is far more horrible in appearance, is unmistakable, but it is
less common in Fiji than nerve leprosy or a mixture of the two.
The isolation enforced by the Fijians appears to correspond with the
practice of the Hebrews and Philistines, who drove the pauper lepers
without the city gate, but let the high-born leper alone. Ratu Joseva,
Thakombau's son, like Naaman, still maintained a household of retainers.
The lot of the isolated leper in Fiji is not a very hard one while he
has strength to move about. A hut is built for him in the bush; firewood
is abundant; wild yams are to be had for the digging, wild fowls and
pigs for the trapping; he can pick the best land for his plantation. But
when the poor wretch loses the use of his legs an awful fate may await
him. A horrible story is told of a leper on the Tailevu coast who had
lost all sensation in his feet. Waking by his fire one morning he
noticed a smell of roasting flesh, and wondered for some moments whence
it came, until, when he moved himself to look out of the doorway, he
noticed that the logs in the fire-place stirred, and saw that his own
feet had been lying in the fire, and were burned to cinders.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 95: The greater part of this chapter is drawn from an able
paper contributed to the _Folklore Journal_, 1895, by Dr. Bolton G.
Corney, Chief Medical Officer of Fiji, who has made a special study of
the subject.]
[Footnote 96: White.]
[Footnote 97: Manson, _Tropical Diseases_.]
[Footnote 98: _Voyage aux iles du Grand Ocean_, par. J. A. Moerenhout.
(Vol. ii, p. 156.) Paris, 1837.]