Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/81

 COLLECTANEA.

Boer Folk-Medicine and some Parallels.

In the Blue-book containing the Reports on the Working of the Refugee Camps in the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Cape Colony, and Natal, mention is made by three or four of the doctors inspecting the camps of the treatment and remedies for iUness they found in use among the Boers. I have thought it worth while to put together the following extracts, as it is interest- ing to find that the methods used are similar to such as were general here many years ago and are still occasionally to be met with.

Unfortunately, few of the inspectors enter into details, but all agree that the Boers, especially the poorer classes, have little or no knowledge of sanitation or hygiene. To the use of soap and water they have a particular aversion. A schoolmaster related the following incident to Dr. W. M. Brown. An old Boer with six children attending school said to him in conversation quite seriously, that since his children had been to school in the camp they were so cleanly and changed in their habits that he himself was obliged to wash his face and hands before meals to be in countenance with them (p. 335).

This aversion is especially pronounced in illness. Neither children nor elders are apparently allowed when ill either to drink water or to be washed, except occasionally the face and hands. " In one tent at Irene Camp," says Dr. Kendal Franks, " the children were in their ordinary clothes lying on mats. One child had peritonitis. In order to see the abdomen, I had to undo some of the clothes ; the skin beneath was as black as a Kaffir's, covered with accumulations of dirt. To see the skin it would have been necessary to scrape the dirt off." He says children generally were put to bed with their clothes on. The clothing