It can not be doubted that this climate of arid heat and dry cold is eminently suited to most healthy and to many sickly constitutions: children and adults have come from England apparently in a dying state, and have lived to be strong and robust men. I have elsewhere alluded to the effect of rarefaction upon the English physique: another has been stated, namely, that the atmosphere is too fine and dry to require, or even to permit, the free use of spirituous liquors. Paralysis is rare; scrofula and phthisis are unknown, as in Nebraska—the climate wants that humidity which brings forward the predisposition. It is also remarkable that, though all drink snow-water, and though many live in valleys where there is no free circulation of air, goître and cretinism are not yet named. The City Council maintains an excellent sanitary supervision, which extends to the minutest objects that might endanger the general health. The stream of emigrants which formerly set copiously westward is now dribbling back toward its source, and a quarantine is established for those who arrive with contagious diseases. Great Salt Lake City is well provided with disciples of Æsculapius, against whom there is none of that prejudice founded upon superstition and fanaticism which anti-Mormon writers have detected. Dr. Francis, an English Mormon, lately died, leaving Dr. Anderson, a graduate of Maryland College, to take his place: Dr. Bernhisel prefers politics to physic, and Dr. Kay is the chief dentist.
DISEASES.The normal complaints are easily explained by local peculiarities—cold, alkaline dust, and overindulgence in food.
Neuralgia is by no means uncommon. Many are compelled to wear kerchiefs under their hats; and if a head be not always uncovered, there is some reason for it. Rheumatism, as in England, affects the poorer classes, who are insufficiently fed and clothed. Pneumonia, in winter, follows exposure and hard work. The pleuro-pneumonia, which in 1860 did so much damage to stock in New England, did not extend to Utah Territory: the climate, however, is too like that of the Cape of Storms to promise lasting immunity. Catarrhs are severe and lasting; they are accompanied by bad toothaches and sore throats, which sometimes degenerate into bronchitis. Diphtheria is not yet known. The measles have proved especially fatal to the Indians: in 1850, “Old Elk,” the principal war-chief of the Timpanogos Yutas, died of it: erysipelas also kills many of the wild men.
For ophthalmic disease, the climate has all the efficients of the Valley of the Nile, and, unless suitable precautions are taken, the race will, after a few generations, become tender-eyed as Egyptians. The organ is weakened by the acrid irritating dust from the alkaline soil, which glistens in the sun like hoar-frost. Snow-blindness is common on the mountains and in the plains: the favorite preventive, when goggles are unprocurable, is to blacken the circumorbital region and the sides of the nose with soot—the kohl, surmah, or collyrium of the Far West: the cure is a drop of nitrate of silver or laudanum. The mucous membrane in horses, as among men, is glandered, as it were, by alkali, and the chronic inflammation causes frequent hemorrhage: the nitrous salts in earth and air exasperate to ulcers sunburns on the nose and mouth: it is not uncommon to see men riding or walking with a bit of paper instead of a straw between their lips. Wounds must be treated to great disadvantage where the climate, like that of Abyssinia, renders a mere scratch troublesome. The dryness of the air produces immunity from certain troublesome excrescences which cause shooting pains in humid regions, and the pedestrian requires no vinegar and water to harden his feet: on the other hand, horses’ hoofs, as in Sindh and Arabia, must be stuffed with tar, to prevent sun-crack.
Under the generic popular name “mountain fever” are included various species of febrile affections, intermittent, remittent, and typhoid: they are treated successfully with quinine.
Emigrants are advised to keep up hard work and scanty fare after arrival, otherwise the sudden change from semi-starvation and absence of fruit and vegetables upon the prairies to plenty in the settlements may cause dyspepsia, dysentery, and visceral inflammation. Some are attacked by “liver complaint,” the trivial term for the effects of malaria, which, when inhaled, affects successively the lungs, blood, liver, and other viscera. The favorite, and, indeed, the only known successful treatment is by mineral acids, nitric, muriatic, and others.[154] Scurvy is unknown to the settlers; when brought in after long desert marches, it yields readily to a more generous diet and vegetables, especially potatoes, which, even in the preserved form, act as a specific. The terrible scorbutic disease, called the “black canker of the plains,” has not extended so far west.
[154] The following is the favorite cure: it is upon the principle of the medicinal bath well known in Europe.
℞ Acid. Nit. ℥i.
℞ Acid. Mur. ʒii. Mis.
Of this fifteen drops are to be taken in a tumbler of water twice a day before meals. The local application to the hepatic region is one ounce of the nitro-muriatic acid in a quart of water, and applied upon a compress every night.
ANIMALS OF UTAH TERRITORY.There is not much sport with fur, feather, and fin in this part of the Far West: the principal carnivors of the Great Basin are the cougar (F. unicolor) and the cat-o’-mountain, the large and small wolf, a variety of foxes, the red (V. fulvus), the great-tailed (V. macrourus) and the silver (V. argentatus), whose spoils were once worth their weight in silver. There are minks, ermines, skunks, American badgers, and wolverines or gluttons, which ferret out caches of peltries and provisions, and are said sometimes to attack man. Of rodents the principal are the beaver, a burrowing hare, the jackass-rabbit (L. callotis), porcupines, the geomys or gophar, a sand-rat peculiar to America, the woodchuck or ground-hog, many squirrels, especially the Spermophilus tredecim lineatus, which swarms in hilly ground, and muskrat (F. zibeticus), which, like other vermin, is eaten by Indians. The principal pachyderm is the hyrax, called by the settlers “cony.” Of the ruminants we find the antelope, deer, elk, and the noble bighorn, or Rocky Mountain sheep, the moufflon or argali of the New World.