Chills and Fever Vindicated

Here has somehow arisen a strong prejudice against the above phase of country life, and no one has appeared as its champion. It is slung down among diseases, and denounced as though nothing might be said in its favor. For some inexphcable reason, people say nothing of it till they have sold their place. We confess ourselves that while we owned our farm we had a tendency to call it a “bilious attack,” or a “trouble of the liver,” or an “intermittent.” We estimate as amonor the most interestinor periods of our life the season when we were attacked with it. If there were any advantages to be derived, we certainly derived them. It was a matter of some doubt whether we had the chills or the chills had us; but one warm summer afternoon it was decided in our favor. If the people who are longing for a new sensation would only try this! It is a different feeling from that which a man has on any other occasion. Is it not strange that there is so much practical ignorance on this subject when the chills may be so easily taken? You need go no long journey to obtain them. Just wheel your arm-chair to the piazza some June night, or walk along the marsh at dusk, or ride out on a damp evening without an overcoat, and you have them as thoroughly as many a man who has gone to greater expense. Nay, some places are so well adapted to them that without any use of means at all you may win the prize. Chills and fever are entirely unselfish. If a man gets the quinsy sore-throat, or a boil on his back, he is apt to monopolize the entire entertainment; but in the case of which I speak, your family may join you. If the one shakes, they may all shake. If the one looks blue around the finger-nails, they may all look blue around the fineer-nails.

You begin without any apparent reason to feel very tired, awfully tired. You become seriously aware that you have a great many bones, and are convinced that your limbs have a great superfluity of ossification. You begin to yawn till any chicken with the gapes would think you were caricaturing the diseases of the barn-yard You stretch, without any seeming idea as to what you are putting out your hands for. You button up one button of your coat. You walk round the house, and then fasten two buttons. You walk up stairs, and fasten all the buttons. You lie down on the clean white spread, boots and all. Your wife, after criticizing your taste in going to bed with boots on, puts on you all the blankets she can find; and you shout, ‘’ More cover! “She hunts up all the shawls, and piles them up in woollen pyramid. She gets out two or three old dresses, and puts them on; and you cry, “Give us more cover!” Considerably frightened, she lays on the top of the pile her best dresses. She puts on the top of this the children’s clothes, and then gives solidity to the mass by adding two pillows; and through your chattering teeth you exclaim, “More cover!” You feel that you

CHILLS AND FEVER l^INDICATED. 237

are making the Arctic expedition in search of John Franklin, and that the friendly Esquimaux are rubbing you down with a couple of small icebergs. Your tongue is a hailstone, and your nose an icicle.

. By this time the stomach becomes like the Stock Exchange, with all the breakfasts you ever ate trying each to bid the highest, after a while throwing all the securities flat on the market. You save a thousand dollars by getting seasick, without the experiences and perils of an ocean expedition. You feel as if you must have swallowed something that was going toward Tarshish, when it ought to have been going toward Nineveh. You wonder what has got into you; and make up your mind that it must be more Esquimaux riding up and down behind ten dogs fastened to sledges.

Suddenly the climate changes from Arctic to Torrid. Your wife lifts the two pillows; but still you are too hot, and your wife takes off the layer of children’s clothes. But by this time you are like a buried Titan, and away fly off from your struggling limbs the tertiary, cretaceous, carboniferous, and calciferous strata of old dresses and new dresses, shawls and blankets. You wonder why a big blanket is called “a comfortable.” You want air. You want fans. You have an oven In your head, three cooking-stoves under your diaphragm; and if one earns bread by the sweat of his brow, you have shed enough perspiration to buy out several bakeries. You chew ice, and squeeze lemons, and dramatize the ague; and then lie four hours in silence, meditating on the pleasures of life in the country, with fine river- prospect.

The ague is not at all disquieting after you get sufficiently used to it. The trouble with us was, not that we had the ague, but that we did not keep the place long enough to get used to it. We have no patience with those plain, matter-of-fact people who can see no poetry in the ague. They have no appreciation of any great physical enterprise. They run for quinine, or Deshler’s pills, or India Cholagogue, to get rid of that about which many have wondered, but died without the sight.

We have it to boast that, while some of our neighbors beat us in the size of their turnips, and the flavor of their strawberries, we beat them all in the shakes. Indeed, none of them had the chills; they were only troubled with “bilious attack,” or “intermittent symptoms.” Indeed, we never saw in all that region any man who had a fair “out - and - out” attack of chills and fever, except ourselves. We went in to sympathize with our neighbor, afflicted just as we had been. He said nothing much, but looked cadaverous; did not seem to have much animation; gaped nine times during our visit; thought it was a remarkably healthy neighborhood, and got up and put on two overcoats, but said he did not feel chilly; raised both hands as if to strike us to the floor, making us feel like crying out, “My dear sir, what have I done to offend you?” but were relieved by finding that he was only stretching himself.

It may be a recommendation for this physical luxury to those who like permanency and fixedness that this is not like many of the acquisitions of earth, transitory and evanescent. Once get it, and you need have no fear of losing it. It is like the widow’s cruse of oil — it never falls. We knew a Western pastor who had it for fifteen years, and we saw him sitting in ecclesiastical council one day taking a chill as naturally as the Heidelberg Catechism. He looked as if he were gnashing his teeth at heterodoxy; but he was only chattering because he was chilly.

One of the orand moral arguments in favor

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of the ague is the fact that it clothes one with the exquisite grace of humility. Nothing like the shakes to make a man abhor himself He would be willing to sell himself for a low price, and take his pay in parsley and onions. He sinks in his own estimation, till in the comparison he considers the mouse to be a very noble animal, and sits down on the porch, not wanting to be spoken to, and hurls a brick at the cat for making fun of him.

Another thing in favor of this institution is that when you have it you are insured for the time being against any disease. We should like to see a man try to get the croup or the mumps at the time this is on him. It monopolizes a man’s entire attention. He has no time for anything else. He shakes off everything irrelevant. Who will say that this concentration of a man’s attention on one thing is not a valuable mental discipline? He can think of nothing else. It is equal in this respect to a regular course of mathematics. Indeed, the mere matter of counting the shakes gives him a sum in simple addition; and, as he finds his strength being taken away, he goes into subtraction, and tests the rule of three by calculatlne if he shakes as hard as this In one attack, how much he will shake in three. By this time he gets into algebra, and finds out that a chill plus a fever, plus quinine, plus India Cholagogue, plus Ayer’s Antidote, plus boneset tea, plus enlargement of the spleen, plus the doctor’s bill, Is equal to ten fits. But the ague patient rises to still higher mathematics; and, during one of the attacks on the bed, describes with his body an equilateral polygon, and sits up, taking hold his feet till he Is turned Into a hypotenuse, and gets his body so thoroughly mixed up and out of place that he proves that the rectangle contained by the diagonals of a quadrilateral Inscribed in a circle is equivalent to the sum of the rectangles of the opposite sides; and winds up his mathematical exercises by pons asinorum, and a fever deHrium, in which he sees EucHd dancing about with an epicycloid around his neck, and a parallelopiped on his back, and a whole class of college freshmen hanging on to his coat- tail. Now, if there be such mathematical drill in chills and fever, why not have our colleges and young ladies’ seminaries removed from the inland regions, and set the buildings down where they shall have a river-front?

But chills and fever would not be well vindicated did we not say that they always make business lively. Not only is the patient very active at times; but there Is lively work for druggists, doctors, and after a while for enterprising undertakers. For months we made daily pilgrimage to the apothecary. You want to begin with anti-bilious pills. Then you want a febrifuge. Then you want a tonic. All this falling, then you want a physician; then, utterly depressed, you want a minister; and after that you don’t know what you want; but before you have been long In the perplexity of not knowing what you want, you have another chill, and then the perplexity Is over, for you decide that your want is — more cover.

All these wants make lively markets. When you have nothing else to take your attention, you have the buzzing in your ear that comes from large doses of quinine. This noise is like an oecumenical council of bees, and has a poetic and rhydimic effect in reminding you of that delightful refrain, “How doth the busy bee improve each shining hour!”

Oh that all the world lived in the country, and that every house had a river- front!