Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is Common Enough For Travellers To Feel No Effects
From Miasmata Till, On Arriving In A Purer Atmosphere, They Begin To
Enjoy Repose.
A certain excitement of the mental powers may suspend
for some time the action of pathogenic causes.
Our mulatto servant
having been much more exposed to the rains than we were, his disorder
increased with frightful rapidity. His prostration of strength was
excessive, and on the ninth day his death was announced to us. He was
however only in a state of swooning, which lasted several hours, and
was followed by a salutary crisis. I was attacked at the same time
with a violent fit of fever, during which I was made to take a mixture
of honey and bark (the cortex Angosturae): a remedy much extolled in
the country by the Capuchin missionaries. The intensity of the fever
augmented but it left me on the following day. M. Bonpland remained in
a very alarming state which during several weeks caused us the most
serious inquietude. Fortunately he preserved sufficient
self-possession to prescribe for himself; and he preferred gentler
remedies better adapted to his constitution. The fever was continual
and, as almost always happens within the tropics, it was accompanied
by dysentery. M. Bonpland displayed that courage and mildness of
character which never forsook him in the most trying situations. I was
agitated by sad presages for I remembered that the botanist Loefling,
a pupil of Linnaeus, died not far from Angostura, near the banks of
the Carony, a victim of his zeal for the progress of natural history.
We had not yet passed a year in the torrid zone and my too faithful
memory conjured up everything I had read in Europe on the dangers of
the atmosphere inhaled in the forests.
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