They did not return until morning, when they found him dead on the floor.
I heard a well-authenticated story of a case in which all the members of a family died except a creeping infant who subsisted for some time by sucking a breeding sow which was being kept in the kitchen.
During the great cholera epidemic in 1882 it is said that the approaches to the Manila cemeteries were blocked with vehicles of every description loaded with corpses, and that the stench from unburied bodies in the San Lazaro district was so dreadful that one could hardly go through it.
Beri-beri was common among the occupants of jails, lighthouses and other government institutions, as well as in certain garrisoned towns like Balabac.
In 1892 I found the wife of a very dear Spanish friend dying from an ailment which in the United States could have been promptly and certainly remedied by a surgical operation.

I begged him to take her to Manila, telling him of the ease with which any fairly good surgeon would relieve her, and promising to interest myself in her case on my arrival there.

To my utter amazement I found that there was not a surgeon in the Philippine Islands who would venture to open the human abdomen.

The one man who had sometimes done this in Spain stated that it would be impossible for him to undertake it in Manila, on account of the lack of a suitable operating room, of instruments and of the necessary anaesthetist and other professional assistants.

In fact, at the time of the American occupation there was not a modern operating room, much less a modern hospital, in the Philippines.