Page:West African Studies.djvu/243

 theless the keeping of the sick in huts you will find in almost all districts in places—i.e. round the house of a great doctor. My friend Miss Mary Slessor, of Okÿon, has the bush round her compound fairly studded with little temporary huts, each with a patient in. You see, distinguished doctors everywhere are a little uppish, and so their patients have to come to them. Such doctors are usually specialists, noted for a cure of some particular disease, and often patients will come to such a man from towns and villages a week's journey or more away, and then build their little shantie near his residence, and remain there while undergoing the cure.

There is a prevalent Coast notion that white men do not catch small-pox from black, but I do not think this is, at any rate, completely true. I was informed when in Loanda that during an epidemic of it amongst the natives, every white man had had a more or less severe touch, and I have known of cases of white men having small-pox in other West Coast places, small-pox they must either have caught from natives or have made themselves, which is improbable. I fancy it is a matter connected with the vaccination state of the white, although there seem to be some diseases prevalent among natives from which whites are immune—the Yaws, for example.

Less terrible in its ravages than small-pox, because it is far more limited in the number of its victims, is leprosy; still you will always find a case or so in a district. You will find the victims outcasts from society, not from a sense of its being an infectious disease, but because it is confounded with another disease, held to be a curse from an aggrieved Nature spirit. There was at Okÿon when I was there a leper who lived in a regular house of his own, not