SMALL-POX AND LEPROSY AT HONOLULU.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 222, 25 June 1872, Page 3

SMALL-POX AND LEPROSY AT HONOLULU.

The Commercial Advertiser of the 25th May says : —“ No little excitement was caused on Thursday afternoon by tho announcement that a case of smali-pox had been discovered in town. The person attacked by the disease is a young native female, under twenty-years of age. Site left here on board the schooner Juanita, on the 17th, for Molokai, complaining at the time of a slight fever and headache. In a day or so after the eruption came out and soon increased, covering the entire cuticle from bead to feet. At Knhului, where the Juanita met the Ka Moi, the girl was put on board the latter vessel, and brought to Honolulu. Small-pox raged fearfully in Philadelphia during the past; winter, and is always to he found in San Francisco in a more or less pronounced type. The statement is current that a person who came here a passenger from San Francisco bv the Nebraska on the the sth instant, and who died in the American Hospital on the 7th, was sick with tho small-pox.” The same paper on tho 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 tho date of its establishment to March 31, 1872, was 385 ; the deaths up to that date were 190; remaining at the settlement, 380. Included in tho number of lepers are several half-castes, two or three Chinamen, and one European. Several instances arc known in the Sandwich Islands where women have married the second and tliira husband after the first had died of leprosy, and their later partners, after a short time, shared the fate of tho 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 separated from the other population, it is stated that “ the consequence must ultimately be the ruin of the Hawaiian race, and the foreigner would soon be included in the catastrophe.”