Medical Notes. 601 



The account I had of the epidemic is that furnished me 

 by a white governor of the place, who brought his mestizo 

 wife here for treatment, ill with the epidemic. The In- 

 dians at first judged it to be terciana, but found them- 

 selves disappointed in the failure of their native remedies. 

 Becoming, then, panic-stricken, those who were not attack- 

 ed fled to the woods, and many of the sick died, probably 

 as much from neglect as from the disease. My informant 

 has in the last few weeks received news from there that 

 all the Indians had fled excepting two half-groM'n boys, 

 one of whom died after the abandonment of the place. 



From what I could gather, there must have been a sin- 

 gular severity of symptoms. Great fever, characterized 

 by intermissions in some cases ; the appearance of exter- 

 nal abscesses in various parts of the body ; the expectora- 

 tion of blood, in some cases profuse ; rapid supervening 

 delirium, preceded by violent headache. The wife of the 

 governor I found, on her arrival here, suffering from inter- 

 mittent febrile symptoms. She had also several abscesses 

 in various parts of the body, and there was a profound 

 debility, a sense of sinking which was very disagreeable, 

 and very marked anjemia. In her case the disease be- 

 gan with chills ; diarrhea was also one of her first symp- 

 toms, previous to my seeing her, which, I was told, was 

 followed by bloody evacuations, without the other symp- 

 toms of dysentery, however. I was told that death in the 

 fatal cases supervened in some four or five days generally. 

 Her attack had lasted some three weeks when I saw her. 

 On her first getting better, she started down the river in a 

 canoe ; but the exposure caused a re-accession of the fe- 

 ver, which was intermittent, and she remained a few days 

 at a village some one hundred miles above Iquitos, and 

 took passage in the steamer for this latter place, where she 

 has somewhat regained her usual health, after a protracted 



