The wonderful health these people enjoy is really their most attractive trait.  They are healthy and look it.  It could hardly be otherwise in this delightful mountain air, laden with the invigorating odour of the pines combined with the electrifying effect of being close to nature’s heart.  In the highlands, where the people live longer than in the barrancas, it is not infrequent to meet persons who are at least a hundred years old.  Long life is what they all pray for.

They suffer sometimes from rheumatism, but the most common disease is pleurisy (dolor de costado), which generally proves fatal.  Syphilis rages in some parts of the country.  There was at the time of my visit to Pino Gordo hardly a native there who had not, at one time or another, been afflicted with it; but the victims get quickly over it without special treatment, sometimes within a year.  Children of syphilitic parents show the symptoms soon after birth.  Small-pox, too, plays havoc among the population.  I have seen some people suffering with cataract in the eyes, and some foot-runners complained that their sight sometimes became impaired during or after a race.  The Tarahumares have not any cases of tape-worm, although their sheep have it; probably the large quantities of tesvino drunk during the winter may have something to do with this.

Medicine takes remarkably strong hold of the Indians.  One man suffered for two weeks from fever and ague, lost his appetite, and seemed a general wreck; but after a two-grain quinine pill became at once himself again, and a few days later was able to take a message for me to a place forty miles off and return the same day.

The natives do not bathe except in the wet season.  When they go to feasts, they wash their hands and faces, and the women comb their hair.  Sometimes they may wash their feet, but more frequently they clean their heads.  In fact, the regular way of taking a bath is to wash the head.  For this purpose they use an agave called soke.  Occasionally they use a white earth from Cusarare, called javoncillo; it is very soft and it is also used as white colour in decorating pottery.  When the men go into deep water to bathe they smear fat all over their bodies to guard against all kinds of bad animals in the water; women do not usually take this precaution.

A Tarahumare does not commit homicide unless he is drunk.  There are only isolated exceptions.  A jefe politico (prefect) told me that in forty years he had heard of only two murders.  In both of these cases a drunken husband had killed his wife at a feast, and knew nothing of the crime after he became sober.  I have been told that in some rare instances a Tarahumare woman will sit on her child right after its birth to crush it, in order to save herself the trouble of bringing it up.  The Tepehuanes are reputed to do the same thing, and for the same purpose.  Still with both tribes crimes of this kind are exceedingly rare.