AN ANCIENT PERUVIAN EFFIGY VASE EXHIBITING DISEASE OF THE FOOT

Abstract

The accompanying reproduction, from a photograph, of a specimen of Peruvian pottery, represents without doubt a diseased condition of the sole of the foot as well as of the upper lip. In former writings on Peruvian earthenware vessels I have claimed that the amputation of the feet represented on so many of them was due to a disease typified on the faces of many of the images by loss of the upper lip and the nose-an eating disease to whose attacks the feet also were doubtless susceptible. In all the images I have had the opportunity of studying, I have found always amputation of both feet. In each of two cases, one foot had been cut off, while the condition of the other could not be ascertained as the man was represented as sitting on it. Dr R. Lehmann-Nitsche, of La Plata Museum, La Plata, Argentina, has published an account of one image (not beyond question) representing only one foot as amputated , the other foot being marked in outline, not modeled, on the surface of the clay. I have always defined the disease represented on these vessels as uta (skin-tuberculosis), or as uta and syphilis combined ; certainly uta (wolf-cancer) was the precolumbian disease most likely to be depicted in the facial mutilations of the human image. In the specimen which, through the courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, I am permitted to illustrate, are represented multiple ulcerous perforations of the sole of the foot-the effect of uta and of nothing else. Syphilis would not cause such a pathological effect, while the perforation of the sole by leprosy would be unique. In the present specimen mutilation of the nose and the upper lip is also represented, although more crudely than usual. It is probable, then, that the disease which mutilated the face caused the mutilation of the foot also. It is probable, too, that later on in the progress of this disease, the cure of which was possible only 738