By far the majority of deaths among them is due to what the Igorot calls fever —­ as they say, “im-po’-os nan a’-wak,” or “heat of the body” —­ but they class as “fever” half a dozen serious diseases, some almost always fatal.

The men at times suffer with malaria.  They go to the low west coast as cargadors or as primitive merchants, and they return to their mountain country enervated by the heat, their systems filled with impure water, and their blood teeming with mosquito-planted malaria.  They get down with fever, lose their appetite, neither know the value of nor have the medicines of civilization, their minds are often poisoned with the superstitious belief that they will die —­ and they do die in from three days to two months.  In February, 1903, three cargadors died within two weeks after returning from the coast.

Measles, chicken pox, typhus and typhoid fevers, and a disease resulting from eating new rice are undifferentiated by the Igorot —­ they are his “fever.”  Measles and chicken pox are generally fatal to children.  Igorot pueblos promptly and effectually quarantine against these diseases.  When a settlement is afflicted with either of them it shuts its doors to all outsiders —­ even using force if necessary; but force is seldom demanded, as other pueblos at once forbid their people to enter the afflicted settlement.  The ravages of typhus and typhoid fever may be imagined among a people who have no remedies for them.  The diseased condition resulting each year from eating new rice has locally been called “rice cholera.”  During the months of June, July, and August —­ the two harvest months of rice and the one following —­ considerable rice of the new crop is annually eaten.  If rice has been stored in the palay houses until it is sweated it is in every way a healthful, nutritious food, but when eaten before it sweats it often produces diarrhea, usually leading to an acute bloody dysentery which is often followed by vomiting and a sudden collapse —­ as in Asiatic cholera.

In 1893 smallpox, ful-tang’, came to Bontoc with a Spanish soldier who was in the hospital from Quiangan.  Some five or six adults and sixty or seventy children died.  The ravage took half a dozen in a day, but the Igorot stamped out the plague by self-isolation.  They talked the situation over, agreed on a plan, and were faithful to it.  All the families not afflicted moved to the mountains; the others remained to minister or be ministered to, as the case might be.  About thirty-five years ago smallpox wiped out a considerable settlement of Bontoc, called La’-nao, situated nearer the river than are any dwellings at present.

About thirty years ago cholera, pish-ti’, visited the people, and fifty or more deaths resulted.

Some twelve years ago ka-lag’-nas, an unidentified disease, destroyed a great number of people, probably half a hundred.  Those afflicted were covered with small, itching festers, had attacks of nausea, and death resulted in about three days.