162 The Aborigines of Brazil. 



Chronic stomach disease. 



With this disease which although it is at first slow, after- 

 wards progresses with the most acute symptoms, two other 

 affections of the digestive organs are associated, regarding 

 the nature of which I still remain much in the dark. The one 

 is the condition which the Brazilians call Engasco. It is a 

 peculiar kind of indigestion, characterised by a heavy feeling 

 of over-repletion, by continued belching, joined with rumb- 

 ling and griping in the stomach, occuring after meals, and 

 attended by a constantly diminishing power of making fresh 

 blood. Women are especially subject to this condition, and 

 it often might be described as hysterical dyspepsia or Ano- 

 rexia. Raw coarse food eaten in excess seems to be the com- 

 monest cause of this disease, nostalgia is another cause, when 

 Indians are retained by settlers as labourers, in a condition 

 foreign to their usual mode of life. When the disease is once 

 established, they have often a constant craving to eat, the* 

 mud of rivers, the lime from the walls, or pieces of wood. 

 This disease is even still more common among negroes, and 

 individuals of mixed negro blood, and is common at places 

 along the coast, where the planters can neither by warn- 

 ing nor by punishment break young slaves, who have once 

 acquired it, of the habit. 



Spinela. 



The other chronic disease of the digestive organs, which 

 I have several times observed in Indians, especially among 

 the civilized offshoots of the Tupis in Bahia, Pernambuco 

 and Maranhao, is a bending inwards of the ensiform cartilage 

 of the sternum. Piso described this disease (edit. 1658, p. 

 36,) as being endemic there, and called by the Portuguese 

 Spinela; he called it a Prolapsus Cartilaginis mucronatce. 



*The river clay which I saw Indians in the neighbourhood of Coari eat, contains 

 according to Ehrenberg's microscopic investigations, the following polygastric 

 infusoria with silicious coats, Eunotia Bidens, turgida, gallionella granulata? 

 Himantidium arcus, of silicious earthy plants, amphidiscus Martii, A. Rotula, 

 spongiolithis aspera, Sp. inflexa, Sp. rudis, spongilla lacustris. 



