Death by Starvation

1895

How It Feels to Go, Day After Day, Without Anything to Eat.

For the first two days through which a strong and healthy man is doomed to exist upon nothing his sufferings are perhaps more acute than in the remaining stages. He feels an inordinate, unspeakable craving at the stomach night and day. The mind runs upon beef, bread and other substances, but still, in a great measure, the body retains its strength.

On the third and fourth days, but especially on the fourth, this incessant craving gives place to a sinking and weakness of the stomach, accompanied by nausea. The unfortunate sufferer still desires food, but with a loss of strength he loses that eager craving which is felt in the earlier stages.

Should he chance to obtain a morsel or two of food he swallows it with a wolfish avidity. But five minutes afterward his sufferings are more intense than ever. He feels as if he had swallowed a living lobster, which is clawing and feeding upon the very foundation of his existence.

On the fifth day his cheeks suddenly appear hollow and sunken, his body attenuated, his color is ashy pale and his eyes wild, glassy and cannibalistic. The different parts of the system now war with each other. The stomach calls upon the legs to go with it in quest of food; the legs, from weakness, refuse.

The sixth day brings with it increased suffering, although the pangs of hunger are lost in an overpowering languor and sickness. The head becomes giddy; the ghosts of well remembered dinners pass in hideous processions through the mind.

The seventh day comes, bringing increased lassitude and further prostration of strength. The arms hang listlessly; the legs drag heavily. The desire for food is still left, to a degree, but it must be brought, not sought. The miserable remnant of life which hangs to the sufferer is a burden almost too grievous to be borne. Yet his inherent existence induces a desire still to preserve it if it can he saved without a tax on bodily exertion.

The mind wanders. At one moment he thinks his weary limbs cannot sustain him a mile; the next he is endowed with unnatural strength, and, if there be a certainty of relief before him, dashes bravely and strongly forward, wondering whence proceeds his new and sudden impulse. — New York Dispatch.

Peculiar Chinese Parents and Daughters

1896

It is a disagreeable fact that Chinese parents are in the habit, in certain circumstances, of abandoning female infants to death by starvation, and it is one that an apologist for China would like to pass over in silence.

On the other hand, nothing is gained by exaggeration, and as far as my most limited experience allows me to speak, it is enormous exaggeration to talk as if Chinese mothers exposed their daughters habitually and without a second thought. At any rate, the people of Fair-Reply would repudiate the charge with amazement. "He han kai, tso mak kai fit?" "Is she a good one, why throw away?" they would ask.

Why indeed, when a girl of ten in good health and fairly bonny will always fetch $100; while each of the next five or six years will add $10 to her market value? So remembering that from the age of five she will be useful to gather bambu husks for fuel, mind the baby, feed the buffalo, and a year or two later cut fern, dig up pistachio nuts, and carry water, it will be seen that a healthy female child will be by no means an unprofitable investment.

But if the child be sickly, then it is different. The nasty little thing looks so red and helpless and repulsive. If it dies within doors its fractious spirit will remain there, and add another torment to the teeming world of imps that surround us. Better for all parties to deport the tiny spirit to some lonely spot, turn away quickly, and think of something else.

Charity might possibly accept some such revulsion of the maternal instincts in explanation; and the anthropologist will remember "Nature," that "holy thing," and the case of the rabbits once so aptly cited in this connection. — Blackwood's Magazine.