In Siquijor an unfortunate, carried to the cemetery after he had lost consciousness, came to himself, crawled out from under a mass of corpses which had been piled on top of him, got up and walked home.  When he entered his house, his assembled friends and relatives vacated it through the windows, believing him to be his own ghost.  They did not return until morning, when they found him dead on the floor.

I heard a well-authenticated story of a case in which all the members of a family died except a creeping infant who subsisted for some time by sucking a breeding sow which was being kept in the kitchen.

During the great cholera epidemic in 1882 it is said that the approaches to the Manila cemeteries were blocked with vehicles of every description loaded with corpses, and that the stench from unburied bodies in the San Lazaro district was so dreadful that one could hardly go through it.

Beri-beri was common among the occupants of jails, lighthouses and other government institutions, as well as in certain garrisoned towns like Balabac.

In 1892 I found the wife of a very dear Spanish friend dying from an ailment which in the United States could have been promptly and certainly remedied by a surgical operation.  I begged him to take her to Manila, telling him of the ease with which any fairly good surgeon would relieve her, and promising to interest myself in her case on my arrival there.  To my utter amazement I found that there was not a surgeon in the Philippine Islands who would venture to open the human abdomen.  The one man who had sometimes done this in Spain stated that it would be impossible for him to undertake it in Manila, on account of the lack of a suitable operating room, of instruments and of the necessary anaesthetist and other professional assistants.  In fact, at the time of the American occupation there was not a modern operating room, much less a modern hospital, in the Philippines.  Thousands upon thousands of people were perishing needlessly every year for the lack of surgical intervention.  A common procedure in dealing with wounds was to cover them with poultices of chewed tobacco, ashes, and leaves.

In many provinces the people were without medical assistance of any sort, and fell into the hands of native quacks who were little, if at all, better than witch doctors.

The most fantastic views were entertained relative to the causation of disease.  In some towns it was vigorously asserted that after a peculiar looking black dog ran down the street cholera appeared.  In other places cholera was generally ascribed to the poisoning of wells by Spaniards or foreigners.

Cemeteries were not infrequently situated in the very midst of towns, or near the local supplies of drinking water.  Conditions within their walls were often shocking from an aesthetic view point.  As the area available for burials was limited, and the graves were usually unmarked, parts of decomposed bodies were constantly being dug up.  It was the custom to throw such remains about the foot of the cross at the centre of the cemetery.