186 INFECTION AND IMMUNITY 



" Their modes of eating are so extremely careless that inocula- 

 tion can readily take place through the mouth, by means of 

 the saliva or otherwise. They pass their pipes from mouth to 

 mouth, whether any of their number is a leper or not; they kiss 

 and rub their noses together; they eat out of the same calabash 

 with their fingers and drink out of the same cup; in eating fish 

 or meat it is not cut up, but one takes the meat in his hand, and, 

 after taking a bite, passes it on. They drink ava, which is pre- 

 pared by others chewing the root, and whether the one chewing 

 is a leper or not is not considered. Foreigners also become 

 addicted to this habit of ava drinking, and it is remarkable 

 that most of the foreigners who have become lepers are ava 

 drinkers." 



These habits would evidently favour the communi- 

 cation of the disease in the manner by which Morrow 

 believes this usually occurs, which is shown by the 

 following quotation from his valuable article in the 

 Twentieth Century Practice of Medicine. He says : 

 "In the vast majority of cases, I believe that the 

 vehicles of the virus through which contagion is ef- 

 fected are the secretions of the nose and mouth, and 

 that the port of entrance is the mucous membrane of 

 the respiratory and intestinal tract, with secondary in- 

 fection through the blood or lymphatic system." 



There is little doubt that leprosy has existed from 

 a remote antiquity, although there is some difficulty 

 in identifying the disease as we know it by the de- 

 scriptions of leprosy given by Hebrew, Greek, and 

 Arabian authors. In the Middle Ages, also, although 

 the disease was far more prevalent than at the present 



