- NOR only is the dragon worm1 to dread:
- Fell, winged insects,2 which the visual ray
- Scarcely discerns, their sable3 feet and hands
- Oft penetrate; and, in the fleshy nest,
- Myriads of young produce; which soon destroy [260]
- The parts they breed in; if assiduous care,
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With art, extract not the prolific foe.
- OR, shall she sing, and not debase her lay,
- The pest peculiar to the Aethiop-kind,
- The yaw’s4 infectious bane?—The infected far [265]
- In huts, to leeward, lodge; or near the main.
- With heartning food, with turtle, and which conchs;
- The flowers of sulphur, and hard niccars burnt,5
VER. 257. winged insects] These, by the English, are called Chigoes or Chigres. They chiefly perforate the toes, and sometimes the fingers; occasioning an itching, which some people think not unpleasing, and are at pains to get, by going to the copper-holes, or mill-round, where chigres most abound. They lay their nits in a bag, about the size of a small pea, and are partly contained therein themselves. This the Negroes extract without bursting, by means of a needle, and filling up the place with a little snuff; it soon heals, if the person has a good constitution. One species of them is supposed to be poisonous; but, I believe, unjustly. When they bury themselves near a tendon, especially if the person is in a bad habit of body, they occasion troublesome sores. The South-Americans call them Miguas.
VER. 268. niccars] The botanical name of this medicinal shrub is Guilandina. The fruit resembles marbles, though not so round. Their shell is hard and smooth, and contains a farinaceous6 nut, of admirable use in seminal weaknesses. They are also given to throw out the yaws.
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Chigres, chiggers, or chegoes (Tunga penetrans), a flea indigenous to Central and South America. This parasitic insect embeds itself and lays its eggs in the flesh of human hosts. Like the Guinea worm, chegoes were both horrifying and fascinating to European observers, who described them in detail. One such description occurs in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), where an enslaved indigenous woman named Yarico is praised for her skill in removing chegoes. This same Yarico became an important literary figure in the eighteenth century via the story of Inkle and Yarico, which was first told by Ligon himself and then retold as a sentimental tale in Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (No. 11, 13 March 1711). ↩︎
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Black. ↩︎
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Yaws or frambesia tropica is an extremely contagious skin infection caused by the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Physicians associated it primarily with enslaved persons, although Europeans and creoles were also subject to infection. In its early stages, yaws produces skin lesions and ulcers, and it can become debilitating if left untreated for a period of years. By the late eighteenth century, Europeans began to associate severe cases of yaws with obeah men. For example, see Benjamin Moseley’s A Treatise on Sugar (1799). For more on obeah men, see “Obeah” on this site. ↩︎
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Flowers of sulphur refers to a light yellow, crystalline powder made by distilling sulphur. The knicker nut (Guilandina bonduc) is a flowering legume whose native range is the subtropical and tropical parts of the world. ↩︎
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Consisting or made of flour or meal, starchy. ↩︎