Bakídan
This Kalinga chief saved the lives of Colonel Blas Villamor, Mr. Samuel E. Kane, and the author during the first trip ever made through the Kalinga country by outsiders.
A distressingly large percentage of native-born infants died before reaching one year of age on account of infection at birth, insufficient clothing, or improper food. I have many times seen a native mother thrust boiled rice into the mouth of a child only a few days old, and I have seen babies taught to smoke tobacco before they could walk.
Before our party left the islands in 1888, cholera had broken out at a remote and isolated place. A little later it spread over a considerable part of the archipelago. On my return in 1890 I heard the most shocking stories of what had occurred. Victims of this disease were regarded with such fear and horror by their friends that they were not infrequently carried out while in a state of coma, and buried alive. It became necessary to issue orders to have shelters prepared in cemeteries under which bodies were required to be deposited and left for a certain number of hours before burial, in order to prevent this result.
In Siquijor an unfortunate, carried to the cemetery after he had lost consciousness, came to himself, crawled out from under a mass of corpses which had been piled on top of him, got up and walked home. When he entered his house, his assembled friends and relatives vacated it through the windows, believing him to be his own ghost. They did not return until morning, when they found him dead on the floor.
I heard a well-authenticated story of a case in which all the members of a family died except a creeping infant who subsisted for some time by sucking a breeding sow which was being kept in the kitchen.
During the great cholera epidemic in 1882 it is said that the approaches to the Manila cemeteries were blocked with vehicles of every description loaded with corpses, and that the stench from unburied bodies in the San Lazaro district was so dreadful that one could hardly go through it.
Beri-beri was common among the occupants of jails, lighthouses and other government institutions, as well as in certain garrisoned towns like Balabac.