TESTIMONY OF THE UACOS (MUMMY-GRAVE) POT? ERU. TERIES OF OLD PERU. BY ALBERT S. ASHMEAD, M.D. (Read November 20, 1903.) When we search the cemeteries of old Peru, we find by the side of every mummy a number of objects which are useful for him. His pious hands have within ready reach whatever is needed for his eternal voyage. Drink being indispensable in a country of so much dryness as Peru, good care was taken to place convenient to his hands a quantity of water or wine vessels to appease thirst. These clay vessels have human form and give rise to our admiration, just as do the statuettes of the Egyptian tombs or the earthen Cuiles found in those of Tanagras among the Greeks. Historians agree in recognizing in these Egyptian and Grecian images the double or duplicate or soul which survives the departed. Death was definite only if these statuettes disappeared. The belief in a soul, very widespread among every people, existed in Peru. And to satisfy it these people found it convenient to transform the drinking vessel into a soul, that is to say, an image resembling the deceased. Besides, these little potteries had reality pleasing to the artist. The varieties of them are great, representing the child, the woman, the old man, the fat, the lean, the noble and the poor man, with every expression of physiognomy, as sorrow, joy, anger, etc. Occasionally the figures have pendants on the ears or the nasal septum perforated for the introduction of a ring. This last character of figure is in the Museum of the Trocadero, Paris. Some of these potteries show signs of diseases. I have seen one representing a double hare-lip. double hare-lip. Syphilitic and lupoid (wolfcancer) lesions are very frequently shown on the faces, especially the nose and upper lip. We know that these diseases existed in America long before the time of Columbus, and some eminent scientists have made the mistake to believe that because the former disease was very widespread, so common that the old Mexicans had deified it by incarnation into a god (Nanahuatl), that it was carried first to Europe by returning Spaniards. But this is a great mistake, for Virchow shows that this disease had existed in Europe certainly as early as 1472. And Raymond, of Paris, who dug up the bones of the "Madeleines" of France, as the cemeteries of the old leper asylums of the middle ages are called, found unmistakable evidences of its presence as early as the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Evidently many persons afflicted with that destructive disease were thought to be lepers and were locked up to die with them. In ancient Mexico this disease was considered as that of the nobles, the great, a sort of "King's evil." The origin of it in America has been thought by the same scientists to be by a migration of those ancient races from Asia. This is also a great mistake. For had that disease come from Asia, leprosy would have come with it. Now there was no leprosy in those ancient races until Spaniards, Portuguese and negroes had inoculated them with the germs. Syphilis originally in America was the disease of the ancient llama, the pack-animal of Incans and Aymarans. When the ice age had retreated northward and the rivers and valleys of South America became flooded, man emigrated in two ways, in latitude with his beloved and necessary reindeer northward with the snow, and in altitude with his beloved and necessary llama to escape the floods. This animal was a part of his household-his horse by day and his blanket by night, for its alpaca wool kept him warm on Andean heights. Thus man contracted the disease which belonged to the llama. As to the origin of lupus (wolf-cancer), which is also represented frequently on the "huacos pots" of the mummy-graves, it came from the birds, especially parrots, of the Andes. Lupus is skinconsumption. Its germ is the bacillus of Koch. Insects would feed on the parrots dead of aviary tuberculosis and then inoculate human beings. Thus there would be local contamination, skintuberculosis, which quickly became systemic. As soon as the lungs of man became affected, his sputum acted as a means of propagating the disease in his family and village. Amputation of the feet is also a common representation on these potteries and it is real, with flaps covering the ends of bones. But never is a hand shown as amputated. Noses and upper lips are represented as clean cut off, evidently by a surgeon of skill, to cure wolf-cancer of those parts. This surgical procedure must have been quite commonly practiced in those preColumbian days. In the guano beds of the Chincha Islands, as Mantegazza tells |