The bell struck for breakfast, and the captain tried to coax me down into the cuddy, but without success. Towards evening, however, I suddenly felt hungry, the first time for many days past, and I actually managed to get through a good round meal, followed by a quiet smoke on deck.
The voyage lasted a week, at the end of which time all traces of the fever had completely vanished. The snake was, however, only scotched; for the next twenty-five years it periodically raised its head feebly, always of course when least wanted or expected; generally when I was going to bed, and once even at the most awkward and critical period of an accouchement.
This intermittent recurrence continued until I left the East for good and all, when it expired in a singular fashion. I had been suffering for some time past from the most painful boils, all of which had vanished, save one on my leg. Some ten days after my arrival in Europe, and while still in Germany, I was seized one morning with a most acute pain in the region of the abdomen, followed by an attack of the old Burmah fever, from which I lay insensible for three days. On coming round, my attention was at once drawn to a spot on my leg which felt icy cold, and I found that the boil had mortified and was black as a coal. It came out with a charcoal poultice, leaving a circular, deep excavation, which only healed after many weeks.
One of the numerous eccentricities of this disease is to lie dormant in the system for many years; in my own case the “bacilli” appear to have concentrated themselves in the boil, and, after having killed it, must either have died themselves, or come bodily away with the tissues, for I have, during the past twelve years, never suffered the least approach to ague.
The specific germ of this disease will, without a doubt, soon be isolated either in this country or on the Continent: there is a current idea that the mantle of medical discovery has descended upon our friends across the water to our own exclusion; an idea against which such names as Harvey and Jenner alone cry trumpet-tongued.
At the same time some nicety will be requisite to distinguish between those producing quotidian, tertian, quartan and more irregular forms; how it comes to pass that these germs can be in abeyance for many years, and then return to life and activity, is so far a hard nut to crack.
Heat, moisture and vegetation are a combination that produce the most virulent germs, hence the dangers attending the period in the East when the rains are drying up.
Two of the three chief causes used also to operate with disastrous effect in the days before the Lincolnshire fens were drained.
Just as in all countries we can estimate the character of any soil from its natural vegetation, so in India, the appearance of its inhabitants is a sure indication of the healthiness of a district. A leaden complexion, for example, betokens an enlarged spleen, due to constantly recurring attacks of ague, and where this is on the increase, the locality is an unhealthy one.
Unpleasant as such an experience unquestionably is, one can scarcely help being struck by the strange symptoms produced by the circulation of this poison through the system; shivering, accompanied by icy coldness and an insatiable craving for everything warm, inside and out, is succeeded by violent perspiration, and a similar and opposite longing for everything cold. The worst of it is, too, that the germs, nowise routed by this outpour, live to fight another day!