Among the wild tribes of the Afghan frontier : a record of sixteen years close intercourse with the natives of the India Marches / by T. L. Pennell ; with an introduction by Earl Roberts.

“With many illustrations & a map”—title page.

“Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier is a first-hand account by Dr. Theodore Leighton Pennell of the 16 years that he spent as a medical missionary at the medical mission station at Bannu (in present-day Pakistan) on the Northwest Frontier of India. The book was first published in 1908; presented here is the fourth edition of 1927. Pennell begins with a chapter entitled “The Afghan Character,” which is followed by several chapters discussing Afghan traditions, the geography of the border region, and the prevalence of tribal feuds and conflicts. Other chapters include “Afghan Mullahs” and “Afghan Women.” Much of the work concerns Islamic customs and traditions, as practiced in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. Pennell discusses his medical work, which included treating eye diseases (which “form more than a quarter of the whole”), consumption (tuberculosis), and flesh and bone wounds suffered during the numerous blood feuds in which the local tribes engaged. He also discusses traditional medical practices, which included the nearly universal use of charms and amulets, and two widely used treatments, dzan and dam. The former, employed mainly to treat fevers, involved killing a goat or sheep and wrapping the patient in the skin of the animal, “with the raw surface next to him and the wool outside,” a process said to cause profuse perspiration and a breaking of the fever. Dam involved burning into the flesh with a cloth steeped in oil and then set on fire. Purgatives and bloodletting were also widely used. The book is illustrated with photographs; it also contains a small map of the Northwest Frontier Province and a “Glossary of Words Not Generally Used Outside India”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

Includes bibliographical references.

English