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Introduced Diseases.
In his original state the Maori seems to have been ideally healthy. As a usual thing he only died of old age, unless he were slain in battle or fell a victim to maakutu or witchcraft. Tradition states that some six generations ago—perhaps 150 years—a plague, which appears to have been a kind of spotted fever, swept over the country with very fatal results. In Taiamai, a fertile and populous district inland of the Bay of Islands, the number of deaths was so great that the survivors cleared out in a general stampede, leaving the place to be occupied by the Ngapuhi, who spread from Hokianga. It is very probable, however, that as many of the deaths occurred from panic as from the effects of the disease. The visitation passed away, leaving no evil results; but with the advent of the pakeha new diseases came, and came to stay. Certain (venereal) complaints which appeared for the first time do not seem to have made the havoc that might have been expected, though there is little doubt that they helped to lower the system and weaken its power of resistance to other maladies. By great good fortune smallpox has never made its appearance among the Maoris, but measles and typhoid fever have proved most fatal. The former has swept through the country on several occasions, sometimes almost exterminating whole settlements—e.g., when only two individuals escaped out of a population of three hundred in a kainga near the Molyneux River. The remedies used for the measles were often more fatal than the disease itself. Finding that a bath in cold water would cause the spots to disappear, whole parties would immerse themselves in a running stream, with—as might be expected—the most fatal results. Typhoid fever makes its appearance every few years, and once it has visited a settlement it is sure to recur whenever the atmospheric and other conditions are favourable for its development. of late years many of the Native-school teachers have tried to cope with this insidious disease. They have supplied the Maoris with medicine,
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and have instructed them in the elements of the rules of health, but from want of proper sanitation, and from the impossiblity of getting any course of treatment carried out, their efforts have been mostly unavailing. Besides, the Maori is at all times an unsatisfactory patient. Once his vitality falls below a certain point he loses heart, and frequently dies from the mere want of an effort to live. From an epidemic of typhoid fever a hundred died in a village in the north out of a population of five hundred a few years ago, at a time when almost every settlement had a similar visitation. Asthma and consumption probably always existed among the Maoris to a certain extent, but under the healthy conditions that obtained in their primitive state their prevalence was greatly limited. There is no doubt that the receptivity of the Native for these and their contingent diseases—bronchitis and pneumonia—has proportionately increased with the generally lowered tone produced by the causes already enumerated. At the present time, throughout the north—the region in which the contact between the races has been the longest and most intimate—it is rare to find a really sound Maori. Most of the old people are troubled more or less with asthma, while amongst the young and apparently the most robust cases of consumption develop with marvellous rapidity.