208 SANTIAGO. 



family gambles or squanders his scanty earnings, and the mother, nourishing the child with 

 food poisonous at its age, follows the example of the hushand and prostitutes herself from 

 want, the infant receives its death by instalments. Indeed, the greater number of the offspring 

 among the lower orders being natural children, it is not possible for them to live under the 

 indifference with which they are regarded ; and it would seem that the authors of their lives are 

 public executioners, rather than parents their only bond of union being the brute feeling of sen- 

 suality. I repeat it, it appears that their exclusive object was the gratification of lust unhap- 

 pily not the creation of a new being. Under these circumstances the child passes nearly all of 

 its life crying from cold and hunger. Seeking instinctively to satisfy its necessities, it finds 

 only dry breasts whose milk has been expressed at the eyes in sorrow for a profligate husband ; 

 and the matricide is gratified to see the testimony of impure love gradually dwindle away. 

 Whichever way we look, the child is a victim of want ; and it would be far better to convey it 

 to the asylum of public charity than to leave it with such unnatural parents." 



Though the truth of the above may be easily substantiated by any one who will take proper 

 measures to inquire, this is a state of things whose exposition might be regarded as very ungra- 

 cious in a stranger. The writer might have added, very appropriately, that the disease whose 

 ravages are considered the most extensive in sapping vitality is spread to no small extent by 

 the almost universal custom existing among the better classes of employing wet-nurses for their 

 children. Of necessity these women are taken from among the poor, whose ideas of chastity Dr. 

 Mackenna has sufficiently expatiated upon in the article just quoted. Their own illegitimate 

 offspring are either neglected and die, or are put aside, and they themselves, diseased in many 

 instances, impart the seeds of infirmity with their contaminated milk to the children of their 

 employers. The spread of this disease is frightful. 



Another writer, whose paper also is printed in the Annals of the University (for 1849), 

 considers that the earthquake of 1822 has had no little influence on the sanitary condition of 

 the country. Some of his views are quoted, not so much from faith in his deductions as to 

 exhibit opinions entertained by one of the medical profession at Santiago, which were considered 

 of sufficient importance for publication by the faculty of medical science. 



' ' The vivid impressions which the war of independence had left on the minds of many, the 

 sorrow caused in numerous families by irreparable losses, and the terror created at the time 

 by certain measures of the government, were causes more than sufficient to modify the health 

 of the mass and profoundly affect its morale. Add to these the great earthquake and a 

 hundred and fifty lesser ones that succeeded in the course of two months, and it is easy to esti- 

 mate at what point the physical revolution would arrive under the influence of such great, 

 unexpected, and repeated impressions, and which ignorance and equivocal zeal would carry to 

 the most absurd exaggeration. From that fatal epoch those nervous disorders began to develop 

 themselves which, increased by a thousand other causes, have since infested our cities. 

 Dysentery, which to that period was of a mild character and by no means common, assumed a 

 putrid form, became endemic, and at times an epidemic more particularly at Valparaiso and 

 the capital. Finally, to the causes mentioned is also due the formidable increase of that scourge 

 of Santiago, every day assuming more colossal proportions, aneurism. 



"The pernicious influence of the earthquake was not wholly limited to the changes men- 

 tioned. Forty- eight hours after the terrible shock, there began to appear in the women's hospi- 

 tal, then under my charge, a change in the patients, as well in medical as surgical cases. Violent 

 fevers, preceded by prolonged agues and followed by delirium, were observed; in various surgical 

 cases where only trifling ulcers had previously existed, in twelve hours after the fever, erysipelas 

 spots came out, invariably commencing where the skin was broken, and extending from thence 

 over the whole body. This made its course with incredible rapidity,, terminating ordinarily in 

 gangrene, the precursor of death. If caustic was applied, the first erysipelas spots appeared 

 there: if an operation, however slight, was performed, erysipelas invaded the wound. Nor 

 was this destiuctive disease alone confined to the hospitals : it spread itself over the city with 



