See also Europeans: Texts and Sources

TROPICAL DISEASES

• Astley, Thomas, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol II, London, 1745   Chap. VII SECT VI    The Diseases, Remedies, Deaths and Burials of the Negros 1    Their Diseases, Physicians and Remedies
  • However unwholsome the Country is to Europeans, the natives are troubled with few diseases.
    
    . . .  the too common use of punch, so much in vogue with the English Guineans, which undoubtedly carries many off. . .
    
    . . . the chief medicines here in  use, are first, and above all, lemon, or lime juice; malghetta, or grana paradisi, or cardamoms; the roots, branches and gums of trees; about thirty several sorts of green herbs, impregnated with an extraordinary sanative virtue. . . there are amongst the negros both doctors and surgeons, who, without learning or degrees, perform cures . . . disguising them so, whenever they apply them to the whites, that it is impossible to discover what they are.

   

• Lee, Mrs. R. (Mrs. T. Edward Bowdich), Stories of Strange Lands, London, 1835
  • 334 The progress of fever in these countries is, generally speaking, frightfully rapid; there is no time to wait for the morrow before we venture to apply strong remedies; for, after a. few returns of the disorder, torpor closes the scene. The intervals are generally employed to advantage by throwing in quinine, that the patient may be strengthened for the succeeding fit.

   

• Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982
  • 27      . . . medicine disarmed smallpox through innoculation and vaccination before the century was out. But fevers . . . typhus, dysentery, measles, influenza - rampaged unchecked in epidemic waves, shattering the flimsy defences of the medical pharmacopoeia.
    
    30       There were no anaesthetics and alcohol was the best pain-killer.
    
    294     In the absence of dramatic medical breakthroughs, old wives' herbal medical wisdom survived - dung tea, crabs' eyes, vipers' flesh, stewed owl, the eyes of a pike as a specific for toothache.
    
    295     . . . when sick, the wealthy hesitated whether to trust the physician or to try folk or quack remedies. . . .
    
    302     . . . Cook showed how citrus fruits held scurvy at bay on trans-oceanic voyages

OTHER REFERENCES

Lind,James, Diseases of Hot Climates - five editions 1768 -1808

Tait,David, Spirits of the Bush: a note on personal religion among the Konkomba,Universitas VI Dec 1953 (Konkomba approaches to mental health)

Wilkins,Robert, The Fireside Book of Deadly Diseases, Robert Hale, London, 1994