593 The Andes and the Amazons. 



Ulcers resulting from the various skin irritations are apt 

 to be indolent, and difficult of cure, though in a healthy 

 constitution there is no degeneracy in the type of inflam- 

 mation. The old women cure these remarkably quick 

 sometimes by the application of a compound of which the 

 balsam of copaiba, recently gotten from the adjoining for- 

 est, is the principal ingredient. I noticed on the whole 

 Amazons the frequent use of the copaiba as a stimulating 

 dressing to indolent ulcers or half-healed wounds, and its 

 good effects are of frequent occurrence. 



Leprosy, properly so called, is a stranger on the Mara- 

 non, though it prevails largely in other parts of the great 

 Amazons valley, near the mountainous districts of Matto- 

 Grosso, and Minas-Geraes, in Brazil. 



Of all the diseases one encounters here, which is to be 

 particularly observed for being somewhat out of the gen- 

 eral range of professional notice, is the strange one known 

 as " dirt-eating" {geophagie, mal du coeur, mat d'estomac 

 des negres, erdessen, etc.), and noticed by the French more 

 technicall}'^ under the head Cachexie aqueuse. In De la 

 Chambre's Encyclojooedia the reader will find the subject 

 fully and fairly treated of. According to some writers, 

 this disease had its beginning on our continent in the 

 palmy days of negro-trading on the African coast, when 

 it was transplanted to American shores, and it now enters 

 as one of the chief endemic complaints of all tropical 

 America; and at this distance of over two thousand miles 

 from the sea, on the Amazons valley, where the Negro is 

 a rarity, being merely a waif from Brazil or the Pacific 

 coast, it is the most important disease among the children 

 and women of the country. Here, on the Maranon, the 

 half-breeds are mostly addicted to the practice of dirt- 

 eating — neither the pure brute of a savage nor the more 

 cultivated beinsr so often the victims. Amonsr that class. 



