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Lying on his death-bed, he understood for what a game he had burnt his candle to the socket; comprehended how the agony, and the suspense, and the suffering, and the long, long fever of life, which with him never knew a remittent moment, had robbed him of that which every man has a right to expect, some pleasure in the course of his existence.
The next important step was made in 1885 by Golgi, an Italian, who studied the life-history of the parasite in the blood and distinguished the three forms which cause the three most familiar kinds of malarial fevers, the tertian, the quartan and the remittent types.
The evening of this day I was attacked with urticaria, or "nettle rash," for the third time since arriving in Africa, and I suffered a woeful sickness; and it was the forerunner of an attack of remittent fever, which lasted four days. This is the malignant type, which has proved fatal to so many African travellers on the Zambezi, the White Nile, the Congo, and the Niger.
These vicissitudes of exertion and inertion of the arterial system constitute the paroxysms of remittent fevers; or intermittent ones, when there is an interval of the natural action of the arteries between the exacerbations.
The description of diseases given by the physicians who lived a century ago is for us unsatisfactory; we cannot understand what they meant by their vague designating of hepatitis, fibrous enteritis, diarrhoea and dysentery, peripneumonia, remittent and intermittent gastric fever, protracted nervous fever, typhus and synochus; there is no distinction made in any of the writings of that period between abdominal and exanthematic typhus.
The expedition remained in the river between July 6th and October 18th, little more than three months; yet twenty-one, or nearly one-third, three of the superior officers and all the scientific men, perished. Eyre, palpably of bilious remittent. Professor Smith had been so charmed with the river, that he was with difficulty persuaded to return.
All is animal, and animal of the worst type. Memory irretrievably lost, words and very elements of speech forgotten or words displaced to have no meaning in them. Rage and anger persistent and mischievous, or remittent and impotent. Fear at every corner of life, distrust on every side, grief merged into blank despair, hopelessness into permanent melancholy.
During the career recorded in the foregoing book, I have bidden many farewells; to the Wagogo, with their fierce effrontery; to Mionvu, whose blackmailing once so affected me; to the Wavinza, whose noisy clatter promised to provoke dire hostilities; to the inhospitable Warundi; to the Arab slave-traders and half-castes; to all fevers, remittent, and intermittent; to the sloughs and swamps of Makata; to the brackish waters and howling wastes; to my own dusky friends and followers, and to the hero-traveller and Christian gentleman, David Livingstone.
I infer, then, that in our model city certain forms of disease would find no possible home, or, at the worst, a home so transient as not to affect the mortality in any serious degree. The infantile diseases, infantile and remittent fevers, convulsions, diarrhoea, croup, marasmus, dysentery, would, I calculate, be almost unknown.
As to Quinine, that remedy will unquestionably interrupt the paroxysms of intermittent and remittent fevers promptly if it is given at the proper time and in suitable doses; and, if the attack is the first the patient has ever had, a return of the disease may at least sometimes be prevented by giving once a week in two or three doses, at an interval of twelve hours, about the quantity which would be required to interrupt the disease in the first instance.
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