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Updated: June 8, 2025
There is the usual prejudice shown by the common people against vaccination, and consequently large numbers are sometimes swept away by smallpox. The slightest physical injury, such as a cut or bruise which breaks the skin, requires prompt attention here, otherwise tetanus may follow. It is the same in equatorial America, where a neglected wound is very liable to terminate in lockjaw.
Lockjaw very often follows, even upon the lesser among these injuries, and brings death with it. Besides the deformed persons, a great number of maimed ones may be seen going about in Manchester; this one has lost an arm or a part of one, that one a foot, the third half a leg; it is like living in the midst of an army just returned from a campaign.
In turn, five or six dejected and homesick ladies approached it doubtingly, gave it a single inquiring thump, and retired with the lockjaw. But the boss of that instrument was to come, nevertheless; and from my own country from Arkansaw.
"Oh, doctor," said a worried voice, "something seems to have happened to my wife. Her mouth seems set and she can't say a word." "Why, she may have lockjaw," said the medical man. "Do you think so? Well, if you are up this way some time next week you might step in and see what you can do for her."
I could recreate in my memory, as I shall be able to recreate it as long as I live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain schoolhouse in a French town where seven men wriggled and fought in the unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men and boys too all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black night which would be their portion through all their days.
Then he raised his head, got up on his feet, and opened his mouth like a gash cut in a steer by a cow catcher of an engine, and he yawned, and I guess he got the lockjaw, 'cause he kept his mouth open all the afternoon to get the air, like a soprano singer in a choir, who has been fed a cayenne pepper lozenger by the tenor, just before she gets up to sing: "A Charge to Keep, I Have."
And he honestly thought he was, too; and so he had no one to blame but himself when his voice caught on the center occasionally and gave him the lockjaw. There were those among the unregenerated who attributed the unceasing head-winds to our distressing choir-music.
Now he bristled—and after looking up and down the board for a sympathetic face, and not finding one, he declared, loudly and generally, "’Tain’t so!" "Ye may have noticed that frind Simpson do be t’reatened wid lockjaw in the societee av min, but in the prisince av a female ye can’t count on him.
'There hardly escaped any that had blood drawn of them, but died in strange sort, with their mouths shut some ten days before they died. Hawkins himself was wounded, but, 'thanks be to God, escaped the lockjaw.
"'Wa'al, I says, 'the hoss ain't exac'ly what I expected to find, nor jest what I'm lookin' fer; but I don't say I wouldn't 'a' made a deal with ye if the price had ben right, an' it hadn't ben Sunday. I reckon," said David with a wink at John, "that that there foot o' his'n must 'a' give him an extry twinge the way he wriggled in his chair; but I couldn't break his lockjaw yit.
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