“Of nervous diseases, which are also dreaded and considered ‘subject to shunning,’ I may make mention of iteˊyun, akin to epilepsy” (1-064). Sometimes the usual fits; sometimes “convulsions or … contraction of the muscles, amounting almost to a temporary catalepsy”, lasting several hours with the patient unconscious throughout, passing off and returning within days in a more violent form. “Iteˊyun progresses rapidly, and invariably ends in the death of the sufferer”, though it may take years. With iuˊmetun it is attributed to special spirits whose names are not spoken, and a man taken ill with either while travelling can expect no house, no fire and no warm food.

Identification: unresolved. Three candidates, and the account fits none of them whole. Trichinellosis, from Trichinella nativa in walrus, seal and bear meat, gives seizures in heavy infections, and a shared meal would make clusters within a camp; but it runs its course in weeks to months and most sufferers recover, which is neither the invariable death nor the years. Alveolar echinococcosis, from Echinococcus multilocularis in fox and sledge dog, is fatal in about nine cases in ten untreated, and over years; but it is a disease of the liver, reaching the brain in perhaps one case in a hundred, and the account names no other sign. Its focus across the strait on St. Lawrence Island is documented; its presence in Chukotka in Bogoras's day is not established here. Epilepsy itself, of whatever cause, is the comparison Bogoras makes twice — here, and “violent madness similar to epilepsy” (2-147) — and recurrent fits with recovery between are its shape. The name is also a spirit's (2-019), and a spirit need not name one disease: “progresses rapidly” beside “lasts for years” already reads as more than one course. None is adopted here.