Pathology

The most serious permanent physical affliction the Bontoc Igorot suffers is blindness.  Fully 2 per cent of the people both of Bontoc and her sister pueblo, Samoki, are blind; probably 2 per cent more are partially so.  Bontoc has one blind boy only 3 years old, but I know of no other blind children; and it is claimed that no babes are born blind.  There is one woman in Bontoc approaching 20 years of age who is nearly blind, and whose mother and older sister are blind.  Blindness is very common among the old people, and seems to come on with the general breaking down of the body.

A few of the people say their blindness is due to the smoke in their dwellings.  This doubtless has much to do with the infirmity, as their private and public buildings are very smoky much of the time, and when the nights are at all chilly a fire is built in their closed, low, and chimneyless sleeping rooms.  There are many persons with inflamed and granulated eyelids whose vision is little or not at all impaired —­ a forerunner of blindness probably often caused by smoke.

Twenty per cent of the adults have abnormal feet.  The most common and most striking abnormality is that known as “fa’-wing”; it is an inturning of the great toe.  Fa’-wing occurs in all stages from the slightest spreading to that approximating forty-five degrees.  It is found widely scattered among the barefoot mountain tribes of northern Luzon.  The people say it is due to mountain climbing, and their explanation is probably correct, as the great toe is used much as is a claw in securing a footing on the slippery, steep trails during the rainy reason.  Fa’-wing occurs quite as commonly with women as with men, and in Ambuklao, Benguet Province, I saw a boy of 8 or 9 years whose great toes were spread half as much as those shown in Pl.  XXV.  This deformity occurs on one or both feet, but generally on both if at all.

An enlargement of the basal joint of the great toe, probably a bunion, is also comparatively common.  It is not improbable that it is often caused by stone bruises, as such are of frequent occurrence; they are sometimes very serious, laying a person up ten days at a time.

The feet of adults who work in the water-filled rice paddies are dry, seamed, and cracked on the bottoms.  These “rice-paddy feet,” called “fung-as’,” are often so sore that the person can not go on the trails for any considerable distance.

I believe not 5 per cent of the people are without eruptions of the skin.  It is practically impossible to find an adult whose body is not marked with shiny patches showing where large eruptions have been.  Babes of one or two months do not appear to have skin diseases, but those of three and four are sometimes half covered with itching, discharging eruptions.  Babes under a year old, such as are most carried on their mother’s backs, are especially subject to a mass of sores about the ankles; the skin disease is itch, called ku’-lid.  I have seen babes of this age with sores an inch across and nearly an inch deep in their backs.