The next patient had fever. This one got twenty grains of quinine
in water.
"This man carries no load to-morrow," was the direction, "but he
must not drop behind."
Two or three surgical cases followed. Then a big Kavirondo rose
to his feet.
"Nini?" demanded F.
"Homa-fever," whined the man.
F. clapped his hand on the back of the other's neck.
"I think," he remarked contemplatively in English, "that you're a
liar, and want to get out of carrying your load."
The clinical thermometer showed no evidence of temperature.
"I'm pretty near sure you're a liar," observed F. in the
pleasantest conversational tone and still in English, "but you
may be merely a poor diagnostician. Perhaps your poor insides
couldn't get away with that rotten meat I saw you lugging
around. We'll see."
So he mixed a pint of medicine.
"There's Epsom salts for the real part of trouble," observed F.,
still talking to himself, "and here's a few things for the fake."
He then proceeded to concoct a mixture whose recoil was the exact
measure of his imagination. The imagination was only limited by
the necessity of keeping the mixture harmless. Every hot, biting,
nauseous horror in camp went into that pint measure.
"There," concluded F., "if you drink that and come back again
to-morrow for treatment, I'll believe you ARE sick."
Without undue pride I would like to record that I was the first
to think of putting in a peculiarly nauseous gun oil, and thereby
acquired a reputation of making tremendous medicine.
