Ague

“ Help could not be obtained, but ague comes so regularly to torture its victims that, knowing the exact hour of its approach, we could prepare in advance for it, and have our water, gruel, boneset and quinine ready and within reach. ”

“ I well know ague's genesis, I guess the villain's origin.
Ague was rocked by wind — was put to sleep by chilly air.
Brought by wind, by water drawn, brought forward by hard weather,
Came in the whirlwind of a storm — in the sleigh-tracks of a cold wind
Against us wretched sufferers, against poor unfortunates.
xxx. — The Origin of Cancer.
A furious [v. iron-toothed] old woman,
That moves along with the wind, with the water, with all the fish,
Carried a heavy womb — a belly full of suffering
For thirty summers, for the same number of winters. ”

“ The Conservative Function of Ague.—In my original paper, read before the Philosophical Society of Washington, on the 10th of February last (and of which, as I have said, the present production is an abstract) , I suggested that the natural conservative design of the processes embodied in the term ague was to develop malarial melanosis—in fact, to change the skin from white to black, thus securing adaptation to (i. e., protection against) the environment of inoculating gnats, by clothing the individual with a cutaneous mantle of "protective coloring." ”

“ The symptoms of scurvy, as he gives them, cover perhaps the one moiety of disease, and those of ague the other.
Agues are of two sorts, curable and incurable; the curable are those that come in a common way of Providence, the incurable those that are sent more immediately from God in the way of special judgment, as instances adduced from Scripture show. What is an ague? Some think it is a strange thing, they know not what; the more ignorant think it is an evil spirit, but coming they know not whence. ”

“ Ague is a disease which has always been deemed peculiarly open to the influence of charms. It is said in Devonshire that you may give it to your neighbour, by burying under his threshold a bag containing the parings of a dead man’s nails, and some of the hairs of his head; your neighbour will be afflicted with ague till the bag is removed. In Somersetshire and the adjoining counties, the patient shuts a large black spider into a box, and leaves it to perish ”

“ Ague and scarlet-fever are transmitted to the ass on which the sufferer sits; toothache is passed on to a frog by spitting in its mouth. Even trees are considered able to relieve patients of ague. Mr. Tylor says: “In Thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan berries, a rag, or any small article touched by a sick person, and then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick man from the disease. ”

“ A Sussex cure for ague is to eat sage leaves, fasting, nine mornings in succession; while Flemish folk-lore enjoins any one who has the ague to go early in the morning to an old willow, make three knots in one of its branches, and say "Good morrow, old one; I give thee the cold; good morrow, old one." A very common cure for warts is to tie as many knots on a hair as there are warts, and to throw the hair away; while an Irish charm is to give the patient nine leaves of dandelion, three leaves being eaten on three successive mornings. ”

“ There is scarce a disease that makes a patient more wretched, and unhappy, than the fever and ague. The causes of these kind of fevers is principally from a pituitous, or slimy blood, together with its being loaded with acrimony; and a flacidity of the moving fibres.
They are divided into various classes; though in fact all of one nature. When the ague with its succeeding fever comes on regularly every day, it is called quotidian, or every day’s ague; when every second day, tertian, or third day’s ague, and when every third day ”

“ This autumn the ague was more violent here, than it commonly used to be. People who are afflicted with it, look as pale as death, and are greatly weakened, but in general are not prevented from doing their work in the intervals. It is remarkable, that every year there are great parts of the country where this fever rages, and others where scarce a single person has been taken ill. ”

“ Copland says, that the epidemic prevalence of ague is a better established fact than its infection, and has been admitted by most writers. [41] We have, therefore, but to go one step further to arrive at infection, after having found that an endemic disease under peculiar circumstances, though but rarely, becomes {107}epidemic. The number of persons attacked by ague in a malarious district, in proportion to the population, is not so great as might be expected, considering that they are always subject by night and day, more or less, to respire the air containing the germs of intermittent fever ”

“ And these observations apply with as much force to one disease as another; for even our indigenous ague, originating in some places so limited that the shadow of a passing cloud may mark the boundary of its dwelling place, as inscrutably evades our vigilance, with all the appliances that art can bring to our assistance, in endeavouring to evoke its extraordinary properties under the cognizance of our senses. ”

“ Eating salt provisions, drinking impure water, burning by day and shivering by night, on the borders of a creek which bred disease, with a fatal malaria around, they were unable to resist the ague, which in its worst form seized upon them. Without help and without hope, far from home, in an inhospitable country, sickness seized upon one and all. ”

“ In nature, she said, there is no bane without its antidote, were the intellect of man ripe for its discovery. There are corals and green jaspers, carved into the forms of dragons and lizards, hung round an infant’s neck, for the cure of an ague; the crimson-spotted heliotropium, to staunch a flow of blood ”

“ The officials at the neighboring railroad-station use spring-water pumped from a well. Now ague has, for a long time, been common among the troops at Tilbury Fort, and almost unknown at the railroad-station. During some cleansing and repairs to the tanks, spring-water was obtained from the latter source for several months together, during which time ague disappeared from among the soldiers at Tilbury, but on the tank-water being again brought into use, cases of ague again made their appearance, the disease ceasing on discontinuing that, source of supply. ”

“ The patient blackens the face, adding patches of red over the eyes and nose; a high cap is put on his head and he goes out with a club in his hand and stands motionless in an open place. Sometimes people who want medicine for ague dare not even whisper the name of pai tsŭ for fear that when they speak it, it will come; they will simply give a description of the disease and sometimes hardly that. In some cases of ague a petition is lodged with the kitchen god, beseeching him to use his good offices. ”

“ Ague, or a low fever nearly resembling it, attacks hawks much in the same way as human beings. There are shivering fits and alternations of hot and cold, which may be discovered by feeling the body with the hand. ”

“ No disease is more common here, than that which the English call fever and ague, which is sometimes quotidian, tertian or quartan. But it often happens, that a person who has had a tertian ague, after losing it for a week or two, gets a quotidian ague in its stead, which after a while again changes into a tertian. The fever commonly attacks the people at the end of August, or beginning of September, and commonly continues during autumn and winter till towards spring, when it ceases entirely. ”

“ Paulo but the foul and humid state of the village was, perhaps, sufficient to produce ague in a person much weakened from other causes. The country bordering the shores of the Solimoens is healthy throughout; some endemic diseases certainly exist, but these are not of a fatal nature, and the epidemics which desolated the Lower Amazons from Pará to the Rio Negro, between the years 1850 and 1856, had never reached this favoured land. Ague is known only on the banks of those tributary streams which have dark-coloured water. ”

“ The development of fever and ague in poisoned soil, and fever and ague complicated with China-cachexia.
It is peculiar to intermittent fever to excite the morbid germs which are slumbering in the organism. This is more particularly true in reference to psora. In proportion to universality of the psoric miasm, fever and ague will develop and complicate itself with psoric affections; and it is such complications that give rise to the inveterate [31] character of intermittents and their disorganizing tendency.
In such cases, a cure cannot be effected without some suitable anti-psoric. ”

“ Even in sturdy New England a lingering faith in the superstitions of the old mother-country leads to the manufacture of pills of spider's web as a cure for ague, and Longfellow tells of a popular cure for fever "by wearing a spider hung round one's neck in a nutshell." This was the approved remedy of our British ancestors for fever and ague; and I am told that in Sussex the prescription of a live spider rolled up in butter is still considered good in cases of obstinate jaundice. ”

“ The prevalence of the disease on the same damp soils which produce ague in man and anthrax in cattle has been quoted in support of this doctrine, as also the fact that, other things being equal, the malady is always more prevalent in basins surrounded by hills where the air is still and such products are concentrated, and that a forest or simple belt of trees will, as in ague, at times limit the area of its prevalence. ”

“ Doubtless, also, the degree of infection, various combinations of the species of parasite, and individual idiosyncrasy play a part in determining the intensity and character of the reaction of the human body to the toxin.
Terms employed.—— Acute malarial attacks which recur daily are called quotidian ague; if they recur every second day, they are called tertian ague; if every third day, they are called quartan ague. As a rule, the attacks tend to occur about the same time every day. ”

“ AMULETS USED BY THE COMMON PEOPLE. A variety of things are worn about the person by the common people for the cure of ague; and, upon whatever principle it may be accounted for, whether by the imagination or a natural termination of the disease, many have apparently been cured by them, where the Peruvian bark, the boasted specific, had previously failed. Dr. Willis says that charms resisting agues have often been applied to the wrist with success. ”

“ Practically the only disease due to animal germs, which is sufficiently common in temperate or even subtropical regions to be of interest to us, is malaria, better known perhaps as ague, or "chills-and-fever." ”

“ The fact of having had Ague once does not, as in the case of the Eruptive fevers, protect a man from the disorder thenceforward. So in this sense all persons may be said to be liable to Ague, and none protected from its assault. ”

“ One of the best known insect-borne diseases, and one which is of great importance in many parts of our own country is malarial fever, variously termed ague, chills and fever, etc. This was the first human disease traced directly to insect carriers and gave the impetus which has led to the unraveling of the facts connected with other insect-borne diseases. ”

“ I have kept to the last the special account of this epidemic written by Morley at the end of the second year of it, namely, in December, 1679. He had been a witness of this fever, first at Leyden in the autumn of 1678, and next in England in the autumn of 1679, and he made it the subject of a treatise at the request of an eminent physician in London. It was not so severe by half in England as in Holland, but the English made a great deal more of it, calling it the New Disease, the New Ague, the New Fever, the New Ague Fever, and, in Derbyshire sarcastically, the New Delight. ”

“ The dwelling is the rudest kind of log-house, and the outside is sometimes decorated with the skins of deer, bears, and other animals, hung up to dry. Those people are commonly afflicted with fever and ague; and I have seen many, particularly females, who had immense swellings or protuberances on their stomachs, which they denominate "ague-cakes." The Mississippi wood-cutters scrape together "considerable of dollars," but they pay dearly for it in health, and are totally cut off from the frequent frolics, political discussions, and elections ”

“ Soon after sun-set the ague came on again, which, in my wet state, was very trying; I hardly knew how to keep my life in me. About that time there was a village at hand; but Hassan had no mercy. At one in the morning we found two men under a wain, with a good fire; they could not keep the rain out, but their fire was acceptable. I dried my lower extremities, allayed the fever by drinking a good deal of water, and went on. ”

“ If a person has a desire to be cured of the ague, and has at the same time an aversion (or contrary desire) to swallowing an ounce of Peruvian bark; he balances desire against desire, or aversion against aversion; and thus he acquires the power of choosing, which is the common acceptation of the word willing. But in the cold fit of ague, after having discovered that the act of shuddering, or exerting the subcutaneous muscles, relieves the pain of cold ”

“ Sometimes, when Patients are reduced low by Agues, the Stomach becomes so squeamish as to reject the Bark in every Shape it can be given; in such Cases, when the Ague cannot be stopped by other Means, it may be administered with great Advantage in Clysters, of which the following is a very remarkable Instance.—William Hadderell, a Lad seventeen Years of Age, in the End of the Year 1761, was attacked with a severe Tertian Ague, in which a Mortification came on his left Foot, and one-half of it dropt off ”