To Keep Water Cool. Kind of Vessels
Drinking water in the tropics should always be kept in large vessels of crockery ware (usually termed "stone" and "earthen ware") and smaller bottle or decanter-shaped jugs or vessels for table convenience. If earthen or crockery ware cannot be obtained for table use, by all means use glass bottles—the more globular, or balloon-shaped, the better.
Cool Water
To make and keep water cool in any crockery or glass vessel, wrap around it a cloth or any kind, but especially woolen—flannel or blanket being the best—which keep simply wet, and the water in the vessel, by evaporation from the cloth, can be made or kept almost ice cool.
To Keep the Cloth Wet. Apparatus
A most simple method by which the cloth may be kept wet, and evaporation thereby kept up, is to have a large vessel, with the water in for common use, so placed that a small vessel with water can be suspended over it in such a manner that a drip can be kept constantly on the cloth. The cloth being first saturated, it will readily be seen that a very small drip is required to keep up the dampness. The drip may be arranged, where convenient, with a small faucet so as to regulate the drop, or the more primitive method of a little spiggot or sharpened stick put into a hole made in the vessel, so regulated as to keep up a sufficient dripping to keep the cloth of sufficient dampness. Simple as this may appear to the reader, it is an important sanitary measure, besides adding greatly to the immediate comfort of the traveler or resident in those regions.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere in this region of the continent is much purer than that of Liberia and the region round about; and, although incorporated with odors, these are pleasant and seem familiar to the sense, and not obnoxious with the rich rank fragrance so sensibly experienced in that country. There is little, comparatively, of the decayed vegetation, which sends up malaria from the surface in Liberia; and the immense fields and plains of grass not under cultivation at the time, are burnt down during the dry season, thereby bringing to bear, though probably unawares to them, a sanitary process throughout that extensive country at least once every year.
Kinds of Disease
Intermittent fever, as described in section vi., page 280 on Liberia, though generally of a mild type, diarrhoea, dysentery (neither of which is difficult to subdue by a little rational treatment), opthalmia, and umbilical hernia, and sometimes, but not frequently, inguinal hernia, are the principal diseases. The opthalmia I suspected as originating from taint, probably having been primarily carried from the coast, as it was not so frequently met with as to warrant the idea of its being either a contagion or the effects of poisonous sands or winds, as supposed to exist. The hernia is caused by the absence of proper umbilical attention and abdominal support to the child after parturition. Umbilical hernia is fearfully common all through Africa, I having frequently seen persons, especially females, with the hernial tumor as large as their own head, and those of little children fully as large as the head of an infant a month old.