SMALL-POX AND LEPROSY AT HONOLULU.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1225, 2 July 1872, Page 2

SMALL-POX AND LEPROSY AT HONOLULU.

The Commercial Advertiser of the 25th ,\ May says :— " No little excitement was ? caused on Thursday afternoon ..by the an- f i nouncement that a case of small-pox had been discovered in town. -The person attacked by the disease is a young native female, under twenty years of age. She left here on board the schooner Juanita on the 17th, for Molokai, complaining at the time of v slight fever and. headache. ' In a day or so after the eruption came .; out, and soon increased, covering the' ..entire cuticle from head to foot. At Kahului, where the Juanita met the ■Ka 1 Moi, the girl was put on board the latter vessel, and brought to Honolulu. Smallpox raged fearfully in Philadelphia during ■ the past winter, and is always to be found in San Francisco in a more or less pronounced type. The statement is current that a person who came here as a passenger on the sth instant, and who died in the American Hospital, on the i-r 7th, was sick with the small-pox.*' | The same paper on the Ist, June says :— "The case of this disease which is now on the reef is pronounced by the physicians to be one of the most virulent sort. Another suspicious case has been discovered in town; This was a native , man, in the Queen's Hospital, who has none of the symptoms of small-pox except the eruption." The number of lepers sent to the asylum at Molokai from the date of its establishment to March 31, 1872, was ' 385 ; the deaths up to that date were 199 ; remaining at the settlement, 386. Included in the number of lepers are several ' half-castes, two or three Chinamen, and ' one European. Several- instances are' known in the Sandwich Islands where women have married the second and third husband after the first had died of leprosy, aud their later partners, after a short time, shared the fate of the first. The disease is a most contagious one. Whole families, and those who have lived with them, member by member, have become diseased. The lives- of half-a-dozen persons may be endangered by the " aloha " of one person, and, if they were not sepa-.. rated from the other population; it- is/ stated that "the consequence musfculti- r inately be the ruin of the Hawaiian race, .. and the foreigner would soon be included ■ in the catastrophe." .!