At Berhampore it is dreadfully prevalent; the 48th regiment quitted this a short time ago by the river, and lost nine men at that place. No diet, no care, can avail. Our medical man said, “I can compare it to nothing but a flash of lightning; its effects are instantaneous; the nerves from the first moment are powerless, dull, and torpid.”
If I were to be seized with it to-morrow, I should only strive to resign myself quietly to my fate, feeling, that to strive against the malady is hopeless: in fever you have hope, in cholera scarcely a shadow of it; it is better not indulged; but the disease is so powerful it dulls the senses,—mercifully dulls them.
The cholera is raging at Malda; all the public works are stopped in consequence.
18th.—The thermantidote has been put up in our verandah. The rooms are ten degrees cooler than when we had only tattīs. For the first time I have been laid up with a strong attack of rheumatism and lumbago. My medical man says, “The thermantidote pours forth such a volume of cold air, that if you have fallen asleep near it, it has caused all these aches and pains. ‘Nulla rosa senza spine.’”
THE ARABIAN LEPROSY (KOOSTUM).
Happily this dreadful disease is not as common as the other forms of leprosy: but once I beheld a dreadful specimen of its virulence; going into the verandah at 7 A.M., where the carpenters were all at work, a close and most disagreeable effluvium annoyed me—the cause could not be discovered.
Just beyond, in the garden, lay a lump under a black blanket. “What is this?” said Lutchman, the carpenter, “the smell proceeds from this lump.” He raised the blanket, beneath it was a leper. Lutchman desired the man to quit the grounds. The poor wretch held up his hands and showed his feet; the fingers and toes of which were festering and rotten from the black Arabian leprosy!
I desired he might be carried to the hospital. “We will not touch him,” said the servants; “let him go to the leper hospital.” I sent the man a rupee. “What is the use of a rupee?” said Lutchman, “he cannot enter the bazār; how can he change it?” I sent him some copper coins. “Perhaps some one of low caste will bring him food and take the ānās,” said the carpenter. The poor wretch raised himself, made salām for the money, and crawled away on his knees and elbows.
The next day he was found dead in a field: some of the copper coins had been expended, the remainder and the rupee were on his person.
The man had come up from Calcutta on a boat, had been put ashore under our garden bank, and had crawled up; he had not a cowrie. “There was not even left a sigh in his heart[77].”