An epitome of the reports of the medical officers to the Chinese imperial maritime customs service, from 1871 to 1882 : with chapters on the history of medicine in China; materia medica; epidemics; famine; ethnology; and chronology in relation to medicine and public health / compiled and arranged by C.A. Gordon.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An epitome of the reports of the medical officers to the Chinese imperial maritime customs service, from 1871 to 1882 : with chapters on the history of medicine in China; materia medica; epidemics; famine; ethnology; and chronology in relation to medicine and public health / compiled and arranged by C.A. Gordon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    412/464 (page 388)
    maize, etc., and leaves of the willow, peach, plum, apricot, mulberry, and persimmon were eaten ; also wild herbs, too numerous to name, oily earth, and many other articles not usually consumed. In some instances it was recorded that by means of small sums of money given by the several agencies of relief, those who were living on straw and reeds ground up with a little mud or chaff, or boiled bark, were able by the addition of more substantial food thus put within their reach to tide over the time pretty well until the autumn harvest was cut. [The Ottomaques, a tribe of American Indians near the Orinoco, eat a species of unctuous clay; and this strange diet, which no doubt owed its introduction to the stern monitor, famine, is probably not extremely rare; for Drs. Spix and Martius noticed a similar practice in Brazil, and Captain Franklin found the same food in use among an Indian tribe near the Frozen Ocean. The clay is stated by this traveller to have a milky, and not disagreeable taste.—See Encyc. Brit., vol. ii., p. 693, 8th ed.] [Eakthy Silica.— (c.) Polishing slate (Polischiefer), white or yellow; slaty texture, opaque, brittle, and floats on water; at Bilin in Bohemia • consists of the siliceous remains of animals or plants (Diatomaceaj). (e.) Mountain-meal, snow-white, pearly, grey, or greenish; has a similar origin. Santa Fiora in Tuscany, Oberohe in Hanover, Kymmenegard in Sweden (where it is used as food), in Bohemia, and the Isle of France.]—(Encyc. Brit., 8 th ed., vol. xv., p. 70.) What is now to follow is very horrible. The details are given very nearly verbatim as re- corded in the Report quoted from. In the province of Shansi, under date of March 27th (? 1878, for the actual year is unstated), it is recorded that f up to the present time the people have con- tented themselves with eating those who have died, but now they kill the living in order to have them as food. Husbands eat their wives; parents eat their sons and daughters, and children eat their parents. These things we hear of almost every day/ At Ping Yao people ' laid hold of little children, boiled, and ate them/ In Shu-kwo-hien, two men from a village in the neighbour- hood were apprehended and punished by the magistrate for eating the dead bodies of some twenty persons whose corpses they had taken out of their coffins, sold their clothes, and cooked and ate their flesh. The village in which human flesh had not been eaten was undoubtedly the exception, but in by far the majority of cases it has been the flesh of those already dead, although instances of men killing and eating their fellow-men are not altogether wanting. Five women were brought to trial by the magistrate, for kidnapping, killing, and eating children in Ping-yang- fu. They were sentenced to be buried alive; and the sentence was carried out. In the more northern parts of Shansi they sold human flesh almost publicly; very often the culprits were con- demned to be beaten to death. In a village called Ku-tao a mother killed her own daughter, aged eight years, under the pressure of the famine. It is recorded of eleven villages that in them two- fifths of all the dead were eaten. It is needless to quote further examples. The circumstances and conditions to which this very severe and protracted famine was con- sidered to have been mainly due were noticed and recorded. In reference to the frequency with Causes of Famine w^^c^ similar visitations are recorded in the history of China, allusion is made to the operation of aerial currents in the production of droughts and famines. The denudation of forests, more especially in Shansi, and consequent desiccation of the soil, are recognised as having their influence; it is also stated that in parts of China reckless destruction of forests is going on, the wood used as fuel, while coal-mines in that country are neglected. Another cause exists in the silting up of many rivers and streams through sheer neglect, thereby arresting the progress of irrigation. But above all there is the defective state of roads and other means of communication with the interior, where the famine prevailed with greatest inten- sity. As an example of the extent to which the soil was desiccated, it is noted that at Tientsin it was so to a depth of seven feet, below which there was nothing but salt earth, abounding in