stories of what had occurred. Victims of this
disease were regarded with such fear and horror by their friends
that they were not infrequently carried out while in a state of
coma, and buried alive. It became necessary to issue orders to have
shelters prepared in cemeteries under which bodies were required to
be deposited and left for a certain number of hours before burial,
in order to prevent this result.

In Siquijor an unfortunate, carried to the cemetery after he had
lost consciousness, came to himself, crawled out from under a mass
of corpses which had been piled on top of him, got up and walked
home. When he entered his house, his assembled friends and relatives
vacated it through the windows, believing him to be his own ghost. They
did not return until morning, when they found him dead on the floor.

I heard a well-authenticated story of a case in which all the members
of a family died except a creeping infant who subsisted for some time
by sucking a breeding sow which was being kept in the kitchen.

During the great cholera epidemic in 1882 it is said that the
approaches to the Manila cemeteries were blocked with vehicles of
every description loaded with corpses, and that the stench from
unburied bodies in the San Lazaro district was so dreadful that one
could hardly go through it.

Beri-beri was common among the occupants of jails, lighthouses and
other government institutions, as well as in certain garrisoned towns
like Balabac.

In 1892 I found the wife of a very dear Spanish friend dying from
an ailment which in the United States could have been promptly and
certainly remedied by a surgical operation. I begged him to take her
to Manila, telling him of the ease with which any fairly good surgeon
would relieve her, and promising to interest myself in her case on
my arrival there. To my utter amazement I found that there was not a
surgeon in the Philippine Islands who would venture to open the human
abdomen. The one man who had sometimes done this in Spain stated that
it would be impossible for him to undertake it in Manila, on account
of the lack of a suitable operating room, of instruments and of the
necessary anaesthetist and other professional assistants. In fact, at
the time of the American occupation there was not a modern operating
room, much less a modern hospital, in the Philippines. Thousands upon
thousands of people were perishing needlessly every year for the lack
of surgical intervention. A