It became necessary to issue orders to have
shelters prepared in cemeteries under which bodies were required to
be deposited and left for a certain number of hours before burial,
in order to prevent this result.
In Siquijor an unfortunate, carried to the cemetery after he had
lost consciousness, came to himself, crawled out from under a mass
of corpses which had been piled on top of him, got up and walked
home. When he entered his house, his assembled friends and relatives
vacated it through the windows, believing him to be his own ghost. 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.
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