and weakness of nerves, the tears streaming
down the poor woman's cheeks in showers, without, however, her uttering a
single word, though she moaned incessantly. After bathing her forehead,
hands, and chest with vinegar, we raised her up, and I sent to the house
for a chair with a back (there was no such thing in the hospital,) and we
contrived to place her in it. I have seldom seen finer women than this
poor creature and her younger sister, an immense strapping lass, called
Chloe--tall, straight, and extremely well made--who was assisting her
sister, and whom I had remarked, for the extreme delight and merriment
which my cleansing propensities seemed to give her, on my last visit to
the hospital. She was here taking care of a sick baby, and helping to
nurse her sister Molly, who, it seems, is subject to those fits, about
which I spoke to our physician here--an intelligent man, residing in
Darien, who visits the estate whenever medical assistance is required. He
seemed to attribute them to nervous disorder, brought on by frequent child
bearing. This woman is young, I suppose at the outside not thirty, and her
sister informed me that she had had ten children--ten children, E----!
Fits and hard labour in the fields, unpaid labour, labour exacted with
stripes--how do you fancy that? I wonder if my mere narration can make
your blood boil, as the facts did mine? Among the patients in this room
was a young girl, apparently from fourteen to fifteen, whose hands and
feet were literally rotting away piecemeal, from the effect of a horrible
disease, to which the negroes are subject here, and I believe in the West
Indies, and when it attacks the joints of the toes and fingers, the pieces
absolutely decay and come off, leaving the limb a maimed and horrible
stump! I believe no cure is known for this disgusting malady, which seems
confined to these poor creatures. Another disease, of which they
complained much, and which, of course, I was utterly incapable of
accounting for, was a species of lock-jaw, to which their babies very
frequently fall victims, in the first or second week after their birth,
refusing the breast, and the mouth gradually losing the power of opening
itself. The horrible diseased state of head, common among their babies, is
a mere result of filth and confinement, and therefore, though I never
anywhere saw such distressing and disgusting objects as some of these poor
little woolly skulls presented, the cause was suf