Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/16

6 hair and beards, with whom in the course of these investigations conversations have been held upon the subject, are familiar with leprosy; they can all diagnose it with marvellous accuracy; and they concur generally in stating that they do not remember its prevalence to have been greater or less, or the disease to have presented other features than at the present time. There have, however, been a few dissentients here and there on both sides. To hear a family or tribe spoken of as a leprous one is a common occurrence. A kawa ni vukavuka is the expression often so made use of. It is meant literally, and implies no disgrace or reproach, save in the highest circles (where, indeed, this disease is not unknown).

The occasional allusions to leprosy found in the published journals and narratives of discovery and of missionary enterprise in the Pacific are but sparsely scattered, and for the most part not only vague but hardly more than speculative. Even in such works as those of Cook, D'Entrecasteaux, Labillardiere, Mariner (Dr. Martin), Ellis, John Williams, De Brosses, Anson, Dampier, and others, the term "Leprosy," when met with at all, appears to have been used in a strikingly haphazard way, and to have been loosely confounded with lupus and other strumous affections, with syphilis, itch, ringworm, and even Elephantiasis Arabum, which latter in its turn has been described by several voyagers without being named.

In the narrative of the "Duff's" missionary voyage to Tahiti, Tonga, and Fiji in 1796-7, the last above-mentioned disease is, however, both named and described, but the well-known fur-furaceous condition produced by ecessive yaqona drinking is likened to "leprosy from head to foot," showing that amongst mariners the dominant conception of leprosy had reference to desquamation, a belief which we know to be erroneous. The "Duff's" people failed moreover to recognise the true nature of tona, calling it merely a "tetterous eruption to which the children are often sub-