AT DEATH'S DOOR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 185, 7 August 1935, Page 12

AT DEATH'S DOOR.

DOCTOR'S MEMORIES.

STRICKEN BY TYPHOID. LONELY ISLAND EXPERIENCE. To face death on a lonely island from a disease which he was endeavouring to conquer was once the experience of Professor E. Aitken Seagar, a specialist in tropical dieeaees, who arrived in Auckland yesterday from London. Research work has taken Professor Seagar into many out of the way disease-ridden parts of the world, but his major scare came to him last year on Caicos Inlands in the West Indies. In these islands, he said, every native at ono time or another suffered from a sovcro form of typhoid—called locally "intestinal influenza" — which either killed them or left them immune. To one of these islands ("a God-forsaken spot," he described it) went Professor Seagar, conducting his researches into virus diseases. And there, away from all except native assistance, he was himself stricken with typhoid.

Day by day ho grew weaker, and day by day hope grow more faint that he would be rescued. At last, when he had resigned himself to the. end, a passing sloop picked him up and took him to Grand Turk, where he was transhipped to a steamer bound for Jamaica.

It was not the- first time that Professor Seagar had suffered for his researches. On a number of occasions when working alone in the jungle he Buffered from fever, malaria and dysentery. It was a danger faced by all men in those parts of the world, said Professor Seagar, and he at least had his medical knowledge and stores to assist him.