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There flashed over my mind the recollection of what had been called Korsakoff's syndrome, in which one of the mental disturbances was the memory of recent events. Did not this, I asked myself, indicate plainly enough that Leslie might be right in his suspicions of beriberi?
"Beriberi in New York?" queried Craig, incredulously. "It looks like it," reiterated Leslie, "in the family of a Doctor Wardlaw, up-town here, in the Forum " Kennedy had already shoved over the letter he had just received. Leslie did not finish the sentence, but read the note in amazement. "What are the symptoms?" inquired Craig. "What makes you think it is beriberi, of all things?"
Instead of strutting about, he seemed to be positively wabbly on his feet. Kennedy examined this one longer and more carefully than any of the rest. "There are certainly all the symptoms of beriberi, or rather, polyneuritis, in pigeons, with that bird," admitted Craig, finally, looking up at Leslie. The commissioner seemed to be gratified.
"You know," he remarked, "beriberi itself is a common disease in the Orient. There has been a good deal of study of it and the cause is now known to be the lack of something in the food, which in the Orient is mostly rice. Polishing the rice, which removes part of the outer coat, also takes away something that is necessary for life, which scientists now call 'vitamines."
"Because they show the symptoms of beriberi," persisted Leslie, doggedly. "You know what they are like. If you care to go into the matter I think I can convince you." The commissioner was still holding the letter and gazing, puzzled, from it to us. It seemed as if he regarded it merely as confirming his own suspicions that something was wrong, even though it shed no real light on the matter.
"Do you know, Kennedy," he said, at length, turning in his chair and facing us, "I believe we have found one of the strangest cases in the history of the department." The commissioner paused, then went on, quickly, "It looks as if it were nothing less than an epidemic of beriberi not on a ship coming into port as so often happens, but actually in the heart of the city."
Kennedy was hastily comparing the anonymous note he had received with something Chase had brought. "Some one," he shot out, suddenly, looking up and facing us, "has, as I have intimated, been removing or destroying the vital principle in the food these vitamines. Clearly the purpose was to make this case look like an epidemic of beriberi, polyneuritis. That part has been clear to me for some time.
And one muskeeter standin' on its head does all that, hey?" "So they say. Also they say it's only the female that bites." "Yeah. I believe it. I been stung more 'n once by females before now. How about the yeller fever? Git that the same way?" "Same way, only a different mosquito the stegomyia. When you begin to vomit black you're gone. And if you get beriberi you're gone, too.
Even the great progress in sanitation, which has successfully suppressed smallpox, the bubonic plague, and Asiatic cholera, has found the cause of and a cure for beriberi, has segregated the lepers, has helped to make Manila the most healthful city in the Orient, and to free life throughout the whole archipelago from its former dread diseases, is nevertheless incomplete in many essentials of permanence in sanitary policy.
Fish and rice, with lumps of salt and sometimes a bit of fruit, constitute their only diet. In the babies this mass of undigested half-cooked rice remains in the abdomen and produces what is called "rice belly." In the adults it brings beriberi, from which they die quickly. They suffer from boils and impure blood and many skin diseases.
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