e; they
are sometimes very serious, laying a person up ten days at a time.
The feet of adults who work in the water-filled rice paddies are dry,
seamed, and cracked on the bottoms. These "rice-paddy feet," called
"fung-as'," are often so sore that the person can not go on the trails
for any considerable distance.
I believe not 5 per cent of the people are without eruptions of
the skin. It is practically impossible to find an adult whose body
is not marked with shiny patches showing where large eruptions have
been. Babes of one or two months do not appear to have skin diseases,
but those of three and four are sometimes half covered with itching,
discharging eruptions. Babes under a year old, such as are most
carried on their mother's backs, are especially subject to a mass of
sores about the ankles; the skin disease is itch, called ku'-lid. I
have seen babes of this age with sores an inch across and nearly an
inch deep in their backs.
Relatively there are few large sores on the people such as boils
and ulcers, but a person may have a dozen or half a hundred itching
eruptions the size of a half pea scattered over his arms, legs,
and trunk. From these he habitually squeezes the pus onto his thumb
nail, and at once ignorantly cleans the nail on some other part of
the body. The general prevalence of this itch is largely due to the
gregarious life of the people -- to the fact that the males lounge in
public quarters, and all, except married men and women, sleep in these
same quarters where the naked skin readily takes up virus left on the
stone seats and sleeping boards by an infected companion. In Banawi,
in the Quiangan culture area, a district having no public buildings,
one can scarcely find a trace of skin eruption.
There are two adult people in Samoki pueblo who are insane; one of
them at least is supposed to be affected by Lumawig, the Igorot god,
and is said, when he hallooes, as he does at times, to be calling to
Lumawig. Bontoc pueblo has a young woman and a girl of five or six
years of age who are imbecile. Those four people are practically
incapacitated from earning a living, and are cared for by their
immediate relatives. There are two adult deaf and dumb men in Bontoc
pueblo, but both are industrious and self-supporting.
Igorot badly injured in war or elsewhere are usually killed at
their own request. In May, 1903, a man from Maligkong was thrown to
the earth and rendered unconscious by a heavy timber
|