APPENDICES 441 



and be patient with them. They will make much of a 

 trifle, and make a trifle of a serious symptom. 



The common troubles are the result of over-eating of 

 half-cooked food, and of cold nights and penetrating rains. 

 If you are travelling far, and if you are to be out in the 

 rainy season, see that you have an old tent for every seven 

 men, as well as a new one. The old can be stretched over 

 the new, and both together when pitched admirably, as 

 the men can pitch them, if you insist that they do so, will 

 turn almost any rain. New tents cost seven rupees each 

 ($2.50), old ones you can buy for two rupees, so that the 

 extra cost is not great. This matter of tent-pitching is all- 

 important. Let the men see at once that you will not toler- 

 ate slovenly put-up tents, and they will act accordingly. 

 Leave them alone, and some of your tents will be in rags 

 in a month. When we marched across bamboo country, 

 I made the men, much against their will, cut and carry 

 Ijamboo ridge poles for each porter's tent. Though we 

 encountered unusual rains, there was very little sickness in 

 the sefari. Jiggers, the men see to themselves. Thorn 

 wounds are often troublesome, these you will need to 

 cleanse out thoroughly with disinfectant and keep the dirt 

 out. Old cracks and wounds in the feet are the hardest 

 things to care for. Fever is very common among them. 

 Give a cathartic before giving quinine. 



See a good doctor, if possible a man who has some 

 scientific knowledge of the tropics, and get him to write 

 down for you the treatment necessary for simple cases of 

 cold, fever, dysentery, etc. Many of the doctors in Africa 

 seemed to me, to put it charitably, singularly unenlight- 

 ened; and so long as the home authorities keep on send- 

 ing out, as they do sometimes still, young men who have 

 not even had a single course of instruction in any tropical 

 medicine school, how can the civilian or the soldier have 

 the help and skilled attention they need and surely deserve. 



