﻿vra. 



ON THE CURE OF THE ELEPHANTIASIS. 



BY AT'HAR. ALI KHAN OF DEHLI. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



AMONG the afflicting maladies which punish the 

 vices and try the virtues of mankind, there are 

 few disorders of which the consequences are more 

 dreadful or the remedy in general more desperate than 

 xhtjudham of the Arabs, or khorah of the Indians. It 

 is also called in Arabia dauVasad: a name correspond- 

 ing with the Leontiasis of the Greeks, and supposed 

 to have been given in allusion to the grim distracted 

 and lion-like countenances of the miserable persons 

 who are affected with it. The more common name 

 of the distemper is Elephantiasis, or, as Lucretius 

 calls it, Elephas, because it renders the skin, like 

 that of an Elephant, uneven and wrinkled, with 

 many tubercles and furrows ; but this complaint must 

 not be confounded with the dauTJil, or swelled legs, 

 described by the Arabian physicians, and very com- 

 mon in this country. It has no fixed name in Eng- 

 lish, though Hillary, in his Observations on the Dis- 

 eases of Barbadoes, calls it the Leprosy of the joints, 

 because it principally affects the extremities, which 

 in the last stage of the malady are distorted, and at 

 length drop off; but, since it is in truth a dis- 

 temper corrupting the v\hole mass of blood, and 

 therefore considered by Paul of AZgina as an uni- 

 versal ulcer, it requires a more general appellation 

 and may properly be named the Black leprosy : 

 which term is in fact adopted by M. Boissieu cle Sal- 

 vages and GorrceuSy in contradistinction to the White 



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