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-tâng′, 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, pĭsh-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.
Two women died in Bontoc in 1901 of beri-beri, called fu-tut. These are the only cases known to have been there.
About ten years ago a man died from passing blood—an ailment which the Igorot named literally “ĭn-ĭs′-fo cha′-la or ĭn-tay′-es cha′-la.” It was not dysentery, as the person at no time had a diarrhea. He gradually weakened from the loss of small amounts of blood until, in about a year, he died.
The above are the only fatal diseases now in the common memory of the pueblo of Bontoc.
It is believed 95 per cent of the people suffer at some time, probably much of the time, with some skin disease. They say no one has been known to die of any of these skin diseases, but they are weakening and annoying. Itch, ku′-lĭd, is the most common, and it takes an especially strong hold on the babes in arms. This ku′-lĭd is not the ko′-lud or gos-gos, the white scaly itch found among the people surrounding those of the Bontoc culture area but not known to exist within it.
Two or three people suffer with rheumatism, fĭg-fĭg, but are seldom confined to their homes.
One man has consumption, o′-kat. He has been coughing five or six years, and is very thin and weak.