





















166 On the Boksas of Bijnowr. [No. 3, 
that his admonitions de no good, while the Boksas standing round 
half-laughing denied the charge of drinking more than is good for 
them. They affirmthat the spirits help, with githz and flesh to save 
them from spleen and badz. 
I now come to what is practically perhaps the most  in- 
teresting question connected with the Boksas, viz., their general 
state of health and the diseases to which they are liable. And, in 
palliation of the meagreness of what I have been able to discover under 
this head, it must be remembered that, among savages like these, each 
little fact must be expiscated separately, and the information derived 
from one man checked by repeated cross-questioning of him and 
others. 
It may be premised that inoculation is quite unknown among 
them, and all denied that they use any medicinal substance whatever. 
As one man put it “ What medicine do we know except Bhagwén 
ki ndém 2?” 
The only diseases unconnected with malaria regarding which parti- 
cular inquiries were made, were urinary calculus, leprosy, cholera and 
small-pox. Cases of the two first have occurred among the Boksas, but 
the aggregate number of the tribe is so small, that no generalization of 
value could be made as to the rareness or frequency of these diseases 
among them, as compared with the inhabitants of the district generally. 
Only one epidemic of cholera was mentioned to me. This occurred 
in 1862, and carried off nineteen people out of one middle-sized 
village. Qne sporadic case appeared in another village apparently 
about the same time. é 
The people were able to furnish some particulars of epidemic small- 
pox in five different villages, four of them apparently in the same 
year. The details indicate very varying intensity, as in two of the 
epidemics, although a good many children had the disease, no deaths” 
occurred, while in each of the other three, ten to twenty, mostly young 
persons, died. ; 
Ordinary intermittent fever is not unknown amongst the Boksas, 
but it is by no means common, and a number of those examined had 
had no attack for many years. Deaths occasionally occur from a form 
of fever which seems from their description to be a typhus with 
bilious complication, and which proves fatal in five or six days, if at all, 
