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They had been caught through the assistance of other Punans, and in prison the elder one had contracted the dry form of beri-beri. He was a pitiful sight, in the last stage of a disease not usually found among his compatriots, no longer able to walk, looking pale and emaciated and having lost the sight of his right eye.
Thorough cleanliness had become an impossibility to them: they were now terribly emaciated and covered by vermin. The captain particularly was a most shocking sight. His legs had become tremendously swelled, probably from the disease known as 'beri-beri, while his body was almost a skeleton, his beard had grown very long, and his face was covered with train oil and dirt.
In order to have one's early teachings on these matters profoundly shaken, one has only to work as a surgeon in a country where tuberculosis, beri-beri, and other preventable diseases, and especially the chronic malnutrition of poverty fills your clinic with suffering children, who at least are victims and not responsible spiritually for their "punishment."
The number of cases of tubercle, anæmia, and dyspepsia, of beri-beri and scurvy, all largely attributable to poverty of diet, is very great; and the relative poverty, even compared with that of the countries which I have been privileged to visit, is piteous.
In this country it is commonly due to alcoholism, but it may result from diabetes or from chronic poisoning with lead or arsenic, or from bacterial infections and intoxications such as occur in diphtheria, gonorrhœa, syphilis, leprosy, typhoid, influenza, beri-beri, and many other diseases.
It was the absence of Bedient, not the actual leaving, that aroused him. The Train had camped in a little nameless town. Cairns, this time, found his companion playing with a child, at the doorway of one of the shacks of the village. Inside, was an old man sick with beri-beri swollen, features erased, unconscious; and an old woman who also had been too weak to flee before the American party.
Many of these deaths were from beri-beri, and were due to a misguided effort to give the prisoners the best possible food. Cholera was raging in the province of Albay throughout the period in question, and the people outside of the jail suffered no less than did those within it. The same is true of malarial infection.
Two days later our good dogs brought in the rest of the family the babes to the warm welcome and plenty at the Children's Home, while one of the pluckiest little women I have ever known, even in a country of brave and self-reliant women, was carried into the hospital partially paralyzed with beri-beri.
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.
Now Sanders had particularly warned Mr. Blowter that under no circumstances should he sleep ashore. He gave a variety of reasons, such as the prevalence of Beri-Beri, the insidious spread of sleeping sickness, the irritation of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and of other insects which it would be impolite to mention in the pages of a family journal.
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