Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/741

 water, boiled or unboiled, altogether; for if you take the boiled or filtered water and put it into one of those water-coolers, and leave it hanging exposed to night air or day on the verandah, you might just as well save yourself the trouble of boiling it at all.

Next in danger to the diseases come the remedies for them. Let the new-comer remember, in dealing with quinine, calomel, arsenic, and spirits, that they are not castor sugar nor he a glass bottle, but let him use them all—the two first fairly frequently—not waiting for an attack of fever and then ladleing them into himself with a spoon. The third, arsenic—a drug much thought of by the French, who hold that if you establish an arsenic cachexia you do not get a malarial one—should not be taken except under a doctor's orders. Spirit is undoubtedly extremely valuable when, from causes beyond your control, you have got a chill. Remember always your life hangs on quinine, and that it is most important to keep the system sensitive to it, which you do not do if you keep on pouring in heavy doses of it for nothing and you make yourself deaf into the bargain. I have known people take sixty grains of quinine in a day for a bilious attack and turn it into a disease they only got through by the skin of their teeth; but the prophylactic action of quinine is its great one, as it only has power over malarial microbes at a certain state of their development,—the fully matured microbe it does not affect to any great degree—and therefore by taking it when in a malarious district, say, in a dose of five grains a day, you keep down the malaria which you are bound, even with every care, to get into your system. When you have got very chilled or over-tired, take an extra five grains with a little wine or spirit at any time, and when you know, by reason of aching head and limbs and a sensation of a stream of cold water down your back and an awful temper, that you are in for a fever, send for a doctor if you can. If, as generally happens, there is no doctor near to send for, take a compound calomel and colocynth pill, fifteen grains of quinine and a grain of opium, and go to bed wrapped up in the best blanket available. When safely there take lashings of hot tea or, what is better, a hot drink made from fresh lime-juice, strong and without sugar—fresh limes are almost always to be had—if not, bottled lime-juice does well. Then, in the hot stage, don't go fanning about, nor in the perspiring stage, for if you get a chill then you may turn a mild dose of fever into a fatal one. If, however, you keep conscientiously rolled in your blanket until the perspiring stage is well over, and stay in