| Description Of Item | Excerpt from page 566 of the book ‘Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years residence in Eastern Africa. Together with journeys to Jagga, Usambara, Ukambani, Shoa, Abessinia, and Khartum; and a Coasting Voyage from Mombaz to Cape Delago’ published in London by Trübner and Co in 1860. Author Reverend Dr J Lewis Krapf describes the physical features, diet, sexual and cultural practices of the ‘Dokos’ people who are only ‘four feet high,’ living in ‘many bamboo woods to the south of Kaffa [Ethiopia] and Susa.’ Lewis explains the ‘Dokos’ are prey to ‘slave-hunters’ who seek them for many qualities including their ‘good health’ because ‘diseases are unknown among them.’ Lewis concludes this lack of disease among the ‘Dokos’ confirms what contemporary physiologists believe – that ‘disease if entirely unknown among primitive people living in a natural state; but that it is the result of those habits which are the concomitants of our ‘civilisation.’
From the collection of Thomas Laycock. |