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The lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out.
Again, at the inn in a little mountain village, where we stopped for the night, mother, father, and every person in the house, to the number of nine, above the age of childhood was either goitrous or cretinous, dull of intelligence, mentally verging upon dementia in three cases, in two of which physical growth had been arrested at childhood.
In the early morning, while I was still lying in my pukai on the floor, I saw many women, a large proportion of whom were goitrous, come to the hall, and make an offering of rice, and kneel down before the Buddha. As time went on, and more kept coming in, small heaps of rice had collected in front of the chief altar and before the cabinets.
The work is striking, and is prized throughout the Republic. In the same quarter of the town, where this local industry is carried on, are many goitrous persons. The disease seems to be confined to the one district, but there perhaps one-half the people have it, most of them to but a slight degree. Occasionally the swelling is notable, and in the families affected we find, as usual, deaf-mutism.
We were shown at once into a clean room, and were soon surrounded by bustle and preparation for our comfort. There are but 143 inhabitants, of whom six four men and two women have goitres. We had been previously informed that the whole town was goitrous. There were three deaf-mutes, but no idiots, in the town.
And each understands... every person... each one so infected understands, that if he eats, drinks, kisses, simply even breathes he can't be sure that he won't immediately infect some one of those around him, the very nearest sister, wife, son... To all syphilitics the children are born monsters, abortions, goitrous, consumptives, idiots. There, Kolya, is what this disease means.
Of this number 2483 were born of healthy and sane fathers; 2285 from healthy mothers; 961 from goitrous fathers; 1267 from goitrous mothers; 49 from cretin fathers; 41 from cretin mothers; 106 from cretin fathers with goiter; 66 from cretin mothers with goiter; 438 fathers and 405 mothers were not specified.
On the green outside their cabin a husband with goitre, enraged against his goitrous wife, was kept from killing her by two elderly goitrous women. All were speaking with horrible goitrous voices as if they had cleft palates, and the husband was hoarse with fury. Jealousy could not have been the cause of the quarrel, for his wife was one of the most hideous creatures I have seen in China.
But no! The lusty dame was still sprightly. She had been three times divorced. The person at present connected with her in the bonds of wedded life also goitrous and morally repulsive stood by and gazed down upon her like a proud bridegroom. He resented the levity of Shanks and his companion, but, owing to the detail of a sightless eye, he could not see all that transpired.
No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed ascent, overlooking a fearful drop. Over to the left I saw an unhappy little urchin, hardly a rag covering his shivering, bleeding body, grovelling piteously in the snow, while his blind and goitrous mother did her best at gathering firewood with a hatchet.
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