Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/310

298 able mortality, it could be shown that reactionary dietetic and therapeutic practices gave the epidemic its malignant character. The importance of that factor in the causation comes out in the clearest way in those epidemics of mea'sles which, springing up among uncivilized peoples, have run a disastrous course in the absence of all rational treatment of the sick.

"Classical examples of this are furnished by the epidemic of 1749 among the natives on the banks of the Amazon, where the number of those that died of the sickness was reckoned at 80,000, whole tribes having been cut off; also in Astoria in 1829, where nearly onehalf of the natives fell victims to the disease; among the Indians of Hudson's Bay Territory in 1846; among the Hottentots at the Cape in 1852; among the natives of Tasmania in 1854 and 1861; and in Mauritius and the Fiji Islands in 1874. Concerning the two last-mentioned epidemics, both of them disastrous, it is stated in the Report— The great mortality has been in large measure due to the fact that the sick were exposed to the most unfavourable conditions. Unprotected from exposure, unattended and untreated, chiefly in consequence of their own unhappy prejudices, every complication of the disease must have been invited and rendered intense; in accordance with this view, we find that those classes of the native population over whom adequate supervision could be exercised have suffered slightly.' Smellie mentions facts of the same kind in the destructive epidemic of 1846 among the natives of Hudson's Bay Territory; of all those who were received into Fort York, and who there received medical treatment, not one died. In the account given by Squire of the frightful epidemic of measles in the Fiji Islands, which was known to have been introduced from Sydney by the retinue of King Kakobau, and which carried off 20,000 of the natives, or one-fourth to one-fifth of the whole population of the Fiji group, we find the following:—

"'The favourable progress of the early native cases negatives the idea of any special proclivity. Dr. Cruikshank, who treated 143 of the native constables, reports