Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 4.djvu/512

 unction, as also by the quantity of water they deluge themselves with at the time they are hottest. The influence of the moon in epilepsies, and the certainty with which the third day after the conjunction brings back the paroxysm in regular intermitting fevers, is what naturally surprises people not deeper read than I am in the study of medicine. Those who live much in camps, or in the parts of Atbara far from rivers, have certainly, more or less, the gravel, occasioned, probably, by the use of well-water; for at Sennaar, where they drink of the river, I never saw but one instance of it, that of the Sid el Coom; as for Shekh Ibrahim, whom I shall speak of afterwards, he had passed a great part of his life at Kordofan. The venereal disease is frequent here, but never inveterate, insomuch that it does not prevent the marriage of either sex. Sweating and abstinence never fail to cure it, although, where it had continued for a time, I have known mercury fail.

The elephantiasis, so common in Abyssinia, is not known, here. The small-pox is a disease not endemial in the country of Sennaar. It is sometimes twelve or fifteen years without its being known, notwithstanding the constant intercourse they have with, and merchandizes they bring from Arabia. It is likewise said this disease never broke out in Sennaar, unless in the rainy season. However, when it comes, it sweeps away a vast proportion of those that are infected: The women, both blacks and Arabs, those of the former that live in plains, like the Shillook, or inhabitants of El-aice, those of the Nuba and Cuba, that live in mountains, all the various species of fiaves that come from Dyre and Tegla, from, time immemorial have known a species of inoculation which they call Tishicree el Jidderee, or, the