the hospital. She was here taking care of a sick baby, and helping to
nurse her sister Molly, who, it seems, is subject to those fits, about
which I spoke to our physician here--an intelligent man, residing in
Darien, who visits the estate whenever medical assistance is required. He
seemed to attribute them to nervous disorder, brought on by frequent child
bearing. This woman is young, I suppose at the outside not thirty, and her
sister informed me that she had had ten children--ten children, E----!
Fits and hard labour in the fields, unpaid labour, labour exacted with
stripes--how do you fancy that? I wonder if my mere narration can make
your blood boil, as the facts did mine? Among the patients in this room
was a young girl, apparently from fourteen to fifteen, whose hands and
feet were literally rotting away piecemeal, from the effect of a horrible
disease, to which the negroes are subject here, and I believe in the West
Indies, and when it attacks the joints of the toes and fingers, the pieces
absolutely decay and come off, leaving the limb a maimed and horrible
stump! I believe no cure is known for this disgusting malady, which seems
confined to these poor creatures. Another disease, of which they
complained much, and which, of course, I was utterly incapable of
accounting for, was a species of lock-jaw, to which their babies very
frequently fall victims, in the first or second week after their birth,
refusing the breast, and the mouth gradually losing the power of opening
itself. The horrible diseased state of head, common among their babies, is
a mere result of filth and confinement, and therefore, though I never
anywhere saw such distressing and disgusting objects as some of these poor
little woolly skulls presented, the cause was sufficiently obvious.
Pleurisy, or a tendency to it, seems very common among them; also
peri-pneumonia, or inflammation of the lungs, which is terribly prevalent,
and generally fatal. Rheumatism is almost universal; and as it proceeds
from exposure, and want of knowledge and care, attacks indiscriminately
the young and old. A great number of the women are victims to falling of