THE EVIDENCE FROM FILIPINO DICTIONARY

Early Filipino dictionaries in Tagalog, Iloko, Bikol and Visayan indicate a familiarity with smallpox (bolotong t., buti v., burtong i., poco b.), measles (tiplas, tipdas t., v., b, darap v.), and mumps (bayiqui, bicqui t.). In the Visayas and Bikol different types of smallpox were identified. Honga in Bikol was described as ‘fatal’ and pinarurcan in Visayan was defined as ‘the virulent kind’.

The existence of only a few lexical borrowings of Chinese terms for diseases, drugs and medical treatments in Tagalog suggests a relatively limited acquaintance with acute infections introduced from China. In contrast, the dictionaries contain many terms for infections that can persist in small populations and which are likely to have been present in the Philippines in pre-Spanish times.

The significantly smaller number of terms for acute infections suggests Filipinos were much less familiar with these diseases in pre-Spanish times.

THE EVIDENCE IN THE EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD

Certain individuals possess innate immunity to diseases as a result of their genetic, biochemical or physiological make-up, but most people acquire it through contact with infections.

At community level, immunity to infections develops as those who are more resistant survive and reproduce and those who are not die in childhood.

Between 1565 and 1600 a number of epidemics, some of them unspecified, afflicted the Philippines.

When the Spanish were based in the island of Panay prior to their occupation of Luzon in 1571, it was said that there had been ‘a great famine among the natives of this island and pestilence’ in which half the population had died.

The Augustinian father, Martín de Rada observed that the 1574 epidemic had spared ‘neither child, nor youth, nor old person’ and there were few Filipinos who had not contracted it.

A similar pattern of mortality was associated with another outbreak of smallpox in 1591. At that time the Jesuit father Pedro Chirino reported that one-third of the people at Balayan in southwest Luzon were sick in bed and that it was ‘killing off children and old men, although of greater danger to adults than to the young’.

About the same time, Manila and its surrounding region were struck by an epidemic that was referred to as ‘a dangerous outbreak of malignant and contagious fever’.

The following year, Governor Dasmariñas and the citizens of Manila both reported that the previous year had been difficult due to ‘common diseases’ that had resulted in the death of both Filipinos and Spaniards.

Only a few years later, a major epidemic disease referred to only as ‘peste’ caused high mortality in many parts of the Luzon to the extent that it was feared that the population would become extinct ‘as in Santo Domingo’.

It was probably the same disease that in the following year spread to Jesuit parishes near Manila causing high mortality, and that subsequently accompanied the arrival of the Jesuits in the Visayas in 1596 and 1597.

The fact that in many cases epidemics that assaulted the Philippines took their heaviest toll of children and the old suggests that some adults at least had a degree of immunity to acute infections. Most likely this was innate immunity or life-long immunity acquired through the experience of an epidemic in childhood.

The relatively intense trading contacts with Asia in the early colonial period may have encouraged the development of a level of immunity to some diseases, particularly around Manila where trade was concentrated, but the fact that high mortality was experienced in some communities and regions on a level comparable to that found in some parts of the Americas, suggests that this immunity was limited.

Ken De-Bevoise argues that the impact of acute infections in the Philippines was felt most profoundly, not in the early colonial period, when the impact of acute infections was moderated by the size and distribution of the population, but in the nineteenth century when population growth and improved communications greatly facilitated their spread.