[Footnote 26:  The affection of the skin, called leprosy in the text, is, in the missionary account, ascribed to the excessive use of the yava, the intoxicating beverage of the Otaheitans, and is there said to be regarded by many as a badge of nobility.  This perhaps is something on the same principle as the gout is accounted among us, an evidence of a person’s being rich; for it appears, that the common people in general are as unable to procure the yava in Otaheite, as they are on our side of the world to indulge in luxurious living.  What excellency there is in the scabbed skins of the Otaheitan lepers, to entitle them to the estimation of nobility, or what advantage they find in this to compensate the sufferings of so grievous a malady, is difficult indeed to divine; but it may be very safely affirmed of those among us, who have prospered so well as to obtain the gout for a possession, that they really require all the comforts of riches, though tenfold more than imagined, to render the residue of life any way tolerable.  Yet such is the inconsistency of human nature, and so formidable its weakness of resolution, when pernicious habits are once formed, that few persons, though even writhing at the bare remembrance of its horrors, and dreading its approach as the attack of

   Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
   Abominable, unutterable, and worse
   Than fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceived,
   Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,

can be prevailed on to swear rebellion against it “For,” says Dr Heberden, “this seems to be the favourite disease of the present age in England; wished for by those who have it not, and boasted of by those who fancy they have it, though very sincerely lamented by most who in reality suffer its tyranny.  For, so much respect hath been shown to this distemper, that all the other evils, except pain, which the real or supposed gouty patient ever feels, are imputed most commonly not to his having too much of this disease, but to his wanting more; and the gout, far from being blamed as the cause, is looked up to as the expected deliverer from these evils.”  “The dread of being cured of the gout,” he further remarks, “was and is still much greater than the dread of having it; and the world seems agreed patiently to submit to this tyrant, lest a worse should come in its room.”  It is not difficult to account for such absurdity, though it be quite impracticable to palliate it; and what is worse, from its being founded on something more congenial to human nature than even prejudice, it is almost impossible to remove it.  A single quotation more from the same author, so much in repute among his professional brethren, will at once unravel the mystery, and show how rare a thing a cure is, where the means essential to it are necessarily dependent on the self-denial of the patient.  “Strong wines, and in no small quantity, have the reputation of being highly beneficial