I. The pathological, as well as the physiological, condition in the various human groups presents peculiarities which may be considered ascharacters. These characters are sometimes even more clearly defined, because morbid phenomena are often very strongly marked. This question is one of great interest; but to treat it in the detail which it deserves, would require a greater amount of both time and space than can be given it here. I shall, therefore, confine myself to recalling a few general facts already known, and to quoting a few examples which will serve to fix the nature and meaning of pathological facts regarded from an anthropological point of view.
II. We have, as yet, in treating of the conditions of life, scarcely considered more than theirmodifying action, while it is universally known that they also exert adisturbingaction. Actions of this kind are in most cases the fundamental cause of disease.
We are here, therefore, again led to considerations similar to those with which we have so often been brought in contact. We will therefore recall in a few words the general results of the preceding investigations.
1. Thefundamental natureof all men is the same.
2. The formation of distinct races has been the sole cause of modifications in this fundamental nature of all human groups.
3. The several characters and special aptitudes which constitute a kind ofacquired nature, have, in each of thegroups, been developed under the influence of the conditions of life.
It is clear that when the disturbing action, the cause of disease, works upon thefundamentalelement, the same causes will producefundamentally similar effects;when, on the contrary, this action is exercised upon theacquired and specialelement of each race, the same causes will producedifferent effects. In other words,unity of speciesandmultiplicity of racesinvolve the liability of all men to common diseases, which will, at most, vary as to accessory phenomena; but also allow the existence of diseases more or less peculiar to certain human groups.
Nevertheless, the great majority of diseases will be common to all men, and merely present modifications in the different groups. For example, one race may be either more liable to or more unsusceptible to certain affections than another.
Let me observe in passing, and without insisting upon facts known to all agriculturists and to all breeders, that similar phenomena are presented by theracesof vegetablespecieswhich have long been under cultivation, and of animalspeciesfor centuries subject to domestication.
The propositions which I have just brought forward are the natural result of the facts to which I have already drawn attention, and of the principles admitted at the commencement of this book. They are in remarkable accordance with the results of experiment and observation.
III. It becomes more and more evident, from investigations which are daily increasing in number, that all human races are subject to almost every disease.
The Negro and the White have often been contrasted from a pathological point of view, and it has been stated that localities in which the latter succumb, are not unhealthy to the former. It is said that marsh fevers, dysentery, and abscess upon the liver, so feared by Europeans, do not attack the inhabitants of the coasts of Guinea, and the banks of the Senegal and the Gaboon. These are exaggerated statements which were reduced to their true value by the observationsof Winterbottom, Oldfield, and others. More recent works confirm these earlier observations in every respect: “The Negro race,” says M. Berchon, “suffers from dysentery and abscess on the liver like the white race.... The deadly fevers, which, with the two diseases just mentioned, form the pathognomonical trilogy of Senegalese pathology, will first attack Europeans; but the Blacks are by no means exempt from them.”
The last remark is confirmed in a very remarkable manner by the numbers given in the accompanying table, which I borrow from M. Boudin. He gives a summary of the English official documents upon the annual mortality in the thousand at Sierra Leone from 1829 to 1836.
Sierra Leone is one of the most unhealthy stations for the White race, while for the Negro it is, on the contrary, one of the places where the rate of mortality is lowest. The relation which shows this difference is indeed most alarming (483·0 to 30·1). Yet the nosological table is the same for the two races, for although in this statement there are no eruptive fevers given for the English soldiers, we know very well that the White races are by no means exempt from them.
Other tables drawn up by M. Boudin, with the assistance of the same documents, bring into still stronger relief the fundamental fact now under consideration. In one of them we learn the comparative mortality of the Negro and the Black from marsh fevers in seventeen localities, taken from nearly all parts of the globe, from Gibraltar to Guiana, and from Jamaica to Ceylon. The number of deaths is always considerably greater for the Europeans, but they almostalways rise or fall simultaneously, and in the same place, for the two races, when both are immigrants.
It is almost unnecessary to repeat the remark that all the great epidemics are common to all races, and that the yellow fever attacks indifferently the White, Yellow, or the Black race. The yellow fever is so far from being special in character, and is so subordinate to the action of the conditions of life, that Mexicans from colder regions are as liable to it as even Europeans; and in the islands of the Gulf of Mexico the creole Whites easily withstand those influences which are so fatal to immigrants.
IV. Eruptive maladies, and particularly small-pox, seem to have been unknown in America till they were brought by Europeans to that continent. On the other hand, the latter gave them some of the most serious forms of syphilis, which characterised the terrible epidemic of the fifteenth century. In this fatal exchange, the character of the two diseases was remarkably aggravated in passing from one race to the other, so that populations attacked by them for the first time would suffer much more than those who had communicated the disease. In America, whole populations have disappeared from eruptive fevers, sometimes with terrible rapidity. The celebrated tribe of the Mandans, when blockaded by the Sioux, and unable to escape this scourge, was entirely annihilated in a few days, with the exception of a few absent individuals. Catlin, to whom we are indebted for these details, and who obtained them from Whites protected by vaccination, adds that those who were attacked by small-pox, succumbed in two or three hours. On the other hand, we know what were the consequences in Europe of that infection, which, even at the present day, too often poisons the very sources of life.
Thus, a human race may be unacquainted with one, or several diseases, or with certain morbid forms, though at the same time but too apt to contract them. Once attacked, it may even develop this disease, which is new to it, in a more violent form than any hitherto known.
V. There are diseases which, though common to all human races, attack some in preference to others. The latter then enjoy, compared with the former, arelative immunity. This would necessarily result from what we have already seen. Let us add that these differences in the action of the same pathogenistic cause, are evident in cases of epidemics. When Guadaloupe was attacked by cholera in 1865 and 1866, the rate of mortality was 2·70 per cent for Chinese, 3·86 for Hindoos, 4·31 for Whites, 6·32 for Mulattoes, and 9·44 for Negroes. These figures are the more interesting from the fact that all these races were immigrants.
It seems sometimes, as if two causes of death maintained a kind of equilibrium and reciprocity between two races. I have already, when speaking of acclimatisation, pointed out the contrast which is presented by the Negro and the White from this point of view. Of all human races the White is most sensitive to marsh fevers, and the Black least so. On the other hand, the Negro race suffers more than any other from phthisis, while the White race may, in this respect, be almost classed with other groups, with the Malays for example.
But, again, there are immunities more complete than that of the Negro, from marsh affections; and, further, these immunities may be lost, either in the case of an entire group of population, or in that of isolated individuals. I will here borrow two striking examples from M. Boudin’s work.
Elephantiasis, that affection by which certain parts of the body are sometimes deformed in so strange a manner, is found in the Indies and at Barbadoes. In the latter island, Negroes alone were attacked by this hideous disease till the year 1704.One Whitewas, in that year, affected by it for the first time. But the disease made way, and in 1760 it had extended to thecreolepopulation. Whitesof European originhave, as yet, escaped.
The elephantiasis of India is found in Ceylon. There, again, it only attacks natives, creoles and individuals of mixed blood. Hindoos and Europeans, strangers in the island, are exempt from it. Scott, quoted by M. Boudin,states thatonly one caseof this disease had been observed in a European White. But this individual had inhabited the island for thirty years; acclimatisation had been earned so far in his case as to cause him to lose hisethnological immunity.
On the other hand, we have seen, in speaking of acclimatisation, that creoles easily live and prosper in certain localities which are most dangerous to immigrants. They have, therefore, acquired, at the price of sacrifices made by preceding generations, a relative immunity which is not enjoyed by the majority of Europeans.
In the acquisition of one of these immunities, a race may lose another. In connection with the cholera which I have just mentioned, creole Whites and Negroes were attacked to an appreciably greater extent than Whites and Negroes who had recently immigrated, and were consequently not yet acclimatised. Thus, the conditions of life in Guadaloupe, and those of other Mexican islands, seem to exercise a double action. On the one hand, it diminishes in a considerable degree the aptitude to contract yellow fever; on the other, it renders the human organism appreciably more accessible to the influence of cholera.
VI. Such significant facts as these require no comment. It is clear that we have here thoserelative immunitieswhich several polygenists wished to consider asspecific characters. Without possessing anything approaching the importance which, from this point of view, is possessed by physiological phenomena, they equally render evident the fundamentally identical nature of all human groups. Owing their special element essentially toacquired nature, they demonstrate the difference of races rather more clearly than physiological phenomena. Both, however, are equallyfunctional; and the functions acting necessarily under the immediate influence of the conditions of life, demonstrate almost in the same degree the preponderating influence of the latter.
VII. We cannot touch upon questions of ethnological pathology without saying a few words upon the strange andfatal influence which the White race seems to exercise upon certain inferior races whose territories it has invaded.
Nowhere is this melancholy phenomena more striking than in Polynesia. Figures here speak with touching eloquence.
In the Sandwich Islands Cook calculated the population at 300,000. In 1861 there were but 67,084, about 22 per cent. of the original population.
In New Zealand Cook found 400,000 Maories. In 1858 there were only 56,049 remaining, 14 per cent. of the former population. Depopulation has continued from that time. From 1855 to 1864 the loss was 22 per cent. for the province of Rotorua, the Lakes and Maketou; it was 19 per cent.in two years, from 1859 to 1861, in the Chatham Islands.
In the Marquesas Islands, in 1813, Porter calculated there were 19,000 warriors, giving a population of from 70,000 to 80,000. In 1858 M. Jouan found 2,500 or 3,000 warriors and about 11,000 inhabitants, a decrease of 86 per cent.
From a comparison of the estimates of Cook and Forster, it appears that the population of Tahiti must have been at least 240,000. In 1857 the official census only gave 7,212, that is to say, a little more than 3 per cent. of the original population.
These facts would be equally strange, were they purely local. But they are universal, appearing even in the most isolated islands, in the Bass islands, which form the extreme limit of Polynesia on the south-east. At the beginning of the century Davies counted 2,000 inhabitants; in 1874, Moerenhout only found 300, 15 per cent. of the former population.
The preceding calculations have all been taken from eastern Polynesia, which, as we know, was the first to attract Europeans. A few years ago, however, the western archipelagoes were in their turn invaded, and the population is already sensibly decreasing in the islands of Tonga, Vavau, Tongatabou, etc. The case seems to be the same in the Fijis.
Not only does the rate of mortality increase in this unfortunatePolynesian race; there is also a decrease in the number of births. The fact has long been noticed in a general manner. The following figures give it a strange precision. In the Marquesas Archipelago, at Taïo-Hae, M. Jouan saw the population fall in three years from 400 to 250, during which time only three or four births were registered. In the Sandwich Islands, from among 80 women legitimately married, M. Delapelin found that only 39 had children. There were only 19 children in the twenty principal families of chiefs. Finally, in 1849, the official statistics quoted by M. Remy, give 4,520 deaths, and only 1,422 births. The case is the same at the other extremity of Polynesia. In New Zealand, says M. Colenso, marriages are rarely fertile. The seven principal chiefs of Ahuriri are without children, with the exception of Te-Hapuku; but of the four married sons of the latter, three are as yet without a family. Nine out of eleven marriages were here barren.
Many causes have been proposed in order to explain these melancholy phenomena. Wars, famines, and epidemics have been suggested in turn, but these scourges are only local in their effects. Some have mentioned syphilis, but they forget that the mother of Œdidée had died of this disease before even Wallis undertook his voyage. The blame has been laid on drunkenness introduced, it is said, by Europeans; but before the importation of our spirits the Polynesians were quite able to inebriate themselves with theirkava, more terrible even than our brandy. As to debauchery, we know to what an extent it was carried by the natives, who had, in that respect, nothing to learn from Europeans.
Can it be that a higher civilization bears within itself something which is incompatible with the existence of inferior races? Do the dominion exercised by the stranger, the invasion of the land, and the violence done to religion and customs inspire these men, once so free and proud, with such despair that they refuse to have any posterity? We may allow some consideration to these moral causes in the phenomena which occur in Tahiti, the Sandwich Islands andNew Zealand. But how can we apply this explanation to those archipelagoes where the local race has remained dominant, and where, with its ancient mode of life, it has preserved all the traditions of its ancestors? Now this was the case in the Marquesas during the time that M. Jouan and P. Mathias were there; European inhabitants are still rare in the Samoan and Tongan Islands.
Two naval surgeons, MM. Bourgarel and Brulfert, have alone been able to throw some light upon this melancholy problem. The former found that tubercles wereinvariablypresent in the lungs of bodies submitted to post-mortem examination. The latter tells us that almost all Polynesians suffer from an obstinate cough, and that in eight cases out of ten tuberculosis follows these bronchial catarrhs. Now phthisis does not appear in the list of diseases drawn up by the old voyagers. Have we, then, imported it into these islands? Developing in a new region, in a race to whom it was formerly unknown, has this disease assumed a more terrible form, with examples of which we are acquainted? Already hereditary in our own case, has it become endemic or epidemic in Polynesia? If it is so, we may say that it is all over with the Polynesian race. In another half century, or at most a century, it will have disappeared, at least as a pure race; it will have been replaced by a cross, which in the Marquesas Islands has already begun to increase the population.