Note 268 — Chapter IV

“This is certainly not a common disease now, and although rare, the instances of cure by bony anchylosis (the only way in which a true cure can take place), are even yet more rare. Nelaton, in his Pathologie Chirurgicale, has only been able to note twenty-five recorded cases of such an event. Now, as the space of one year is the shortest possible time allowed by authorities for such a cure to take place, and as during all this time the parts must be kept absolutely at rest, and the person so afflicted being entirely helpless, the inference is a strong one that these people were not in a savage state. They must necessarily have been in such a state, in the progress of advancement in civilization, as to be possessed of an accumulation of food, the requisite leisure of persons nursing the sick, and of dwellings sufficiently comfortable to protect them from inclemency of the weather in this latitude; without those elements of civilization those persons would inevitably have perished.”—Dr. Farquharson in Proceedings of Am. Association for Advancement of Science, vol. xxiv, p. 314.