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At any rate I believe that flesh of soals and blubber would 

 agree very badly with our domestic shoots of one year. I 

 remember to have seen a boy of 3 years one day sucking his 

 mother and a few days afterwards smoking tobacco from his 

 father's pipe. It is not very much in accordance with our 

 principles of education and hygiene of children but the boy 

 looked nevertheless all the better for it. 



Acute catarrhs of the stomach or intestines are general 

 in greater children and grown-up people; they appear not rarely 

 as house-epidemics and are certainly most often due to the 

 eating of flesh of soals or sharks, rotten in whole or in part. 

 It seems to be an exception when these poisonings have a fatal 

 issue; at any rate I could not find any certain instance of it. 

 I shall remark nevertheless that the expedition found an aban- 

 doned place of residence far outside the inhabited district, 

 where numerous skeletons of Greenlanders were found in a 

 winter-house; they were according to what we learned later on 

 certainly rests of some families that had gone northward from 

 the inhabited district 20 years before. IVlost probably they had 

 died of hunger; but it is in no way impossible that illness and 

 then most likely poisoning from rotten flesh may have been at 

 any rate a concurrent cause. Small epidemics of furunculosis 

 sometimes appear, certainly another manifestation of the named 

 poisoning. Bronchitis as well acute as more chronic is a rather 

 general illness both in children and grown-up people. If pul- 

 monary inflammation in the form of our croupous pneumonia 

 is found I don't know. Phtisis certainly appears. I have seen 

 myself a female patient offering at any rate clinically undoubted 

 signs of this illness, and according to what has been told to 

 me, a pulmonary suffering with hæmoplysis, lingering cough, 

 expectoration and emaciation is not rare. But its course seems 

 to be milder than our phtisis generally is. It happens for 

 instance that the Greenlanders the day after such a hæmoptysis 

 unpunished go to their kayaks, and the illness is said to pass 

 often and relatively quickly into recovery. The patient, I saw, 



