CHILLS AND NICOTINE POISONING 53 
Cancer, however, and appendicitis I have never seen. 
Apparently they have not yet reached the negroes of 
Equatorial Africa. On the other hand, chills play a 
great part here. At the beginning of the dry season 
there is as much sneezing and coughing in the church 
at Lambarene as there is in England at a midnight 
service on New Year’s Eve. Many children die of 
unrecognised pleurisy. 
In the dry season the nights are fresher and colder 
than at other times, and as the negroes have no bed 
clothes they get so cold in their huts that they cannot 
sleep, even though according to European standards 
the temperature is still fairly high. On cold nights the 
thermometer shows at least 68° F., but the damp of the 
atmosphere, which makes people sweat continually by 
day, makes them thereby so sensitive that they shiver 
and freeze by night. White people, too, suffer con- 
tinually from chills and colds in the head, and there is 
much truth in a sentence I came across in a book on 
tropical medicine, though it seemed at the time rather 
paradoxical : “ Where the sun is hot, one must be more 
careful than elsewhere to avoid chills.” Especially 
fatal to the natives is the camp life on the sandbanks 
when they are out on their summer fishing expeditions. 
Most of the old folk die of pneumonia which they have 
caught on these occasions. 
Rheumatism is commoner here than in Europe, and 
1 not infrequently come across cases of gout, though 
the sufferers cannot be said to bring it on by an 
epicurean diet. That they eat too much flesh food 
cannot possibly be alleged, as except for the fish-days in 
summer they live almost exclusively on bananas and 
manioc. 
