a temporary hospital hut, but a house with a plantation. He led a lonely life, having no wife or family or slave; he was himself a slave, but not called on for service—it was just a lonely life. People would drop in on him and chat, and so on, but he did not live in town. There was also another one there, who had his own people round him, and to whom people would send their slaves, because he was regarded as a good doctor; but he also had his house in the bush, and not in town.
Undoubtedly the diseases that play the greatest continuous havoc with black life in West Africa are small-pox, divers forms of pneumonia, heart-disease, and tetanus, the latter being largely responsible for the terrible mortality among children; but the two West African native diseases most interesting to the European on account of their strangeness, are the malignant melancholy and the sleep sickness, and strangely enough both these diseases seem to have their head centre in one region—the lower Congo. They occur elsewhere, but in this region they are constantly present, and now and again seem to take an epidemic form. Regarding the first-named, I am still collecting information, for I cannot tell whether the malignant melancholy of the lower Congo is one and the same with the hystero-hypochondria, the home-sickness of the true Negro. In the lower Congo I was informed that this malignant melancholy had the native name signifying throwing backwards, from its being the habit of the afflicted to throw themselves backwards into water when they attempted a drowning form of suicide.[1] They do not, however, confine themselves to
- ↑ An experienced medical man from West Africa informs me that he considers the Africans very liable to hysterical disease, and he attributes the throwing backwards to the patient's desire not to spoil his or her
