156

Report on Kála-ázar.

lived; but as this village was also free from the disease, the
people objected to having her, but her father built a tempo-
rary hut for her outside the village, in the middle of the rice
fields, which were now dried up. I saw all the people in con-
nection with this case, and also the patient herself, who was
in a terribly wasted condition, and had a very large spleen and
liver, and dropsy of the feet, and I tried to get her sent to the
hospital, but this the father said would be against his religion
as long as he was able to support her. I mention this case
to show the terror the people have of the disease, and the
extremes they will go to in order to prevent it being introduced
into their villages, because, I am convinced that in the Mangal-
dai district, the spread of the epidemic has been partially
checked by means of this kind of action on the part of the
people. A similar condition of things was found along
another road which runs parallel to the one that I have just
described, but separated from it by a river and about three
miles of country. This is the main road north from the
Rangamati-ghát, and about 11 miles up it there is a village
two parts of which have had the disease for four or five years,
while the third part, which is separated from the rest by about
two hundred yards of rice-land, has entirely escaped. On
inquiry here the headman told me that ever since the disease
had been prevalent in this part of the district, he would not let
any one from his part of the village hold any communication
with the infected villages, and he carried this to such a degree
that when any of his people had relatives ill with the fever, he
would not allow them to be visited, even if they lived in the
other parts of their own village and if they died, their funeral
was not attended. This is of course against all their customs
and religion, and it must have required a very strong belief
in the communicability of the disease for such a thing to be
possible. The good effect was, however, undoubted, as every
other village but this one in the immediate vicinity had suffered
severely from the epidemics, This man had an idea that if
any one bought any article of value which had belonged to a