"MODIFIED SMALL POX."

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXVII, Issue 144, 22 June 1903, Page 2

"MODIFIED SMALL POX."

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I shall be grateful to you if you will kindly insert this in your paper. News has reached me that the "small-pox scare" has been rather rampant in your district, enhanced, I fear, by the knowledge that some of my relations and friends have received letters from members of the quarantined household. I beg they will cease to tremble. Ifc is with the full consent of two Health Officers (Drs Valentine and Ogston) that we write and post letters, subjecting them to fumigation, (they have given us this authority during the first week of our quarantine) a proof in itself how harmless they must consider " Modified Small-pox." When our quarantine will end, ye gods and little fishes only know. Hope, though last remaining virtue, still lives within me, and breathes a time of happy reunion with friends in my native M arl borough. But there comes a dark whisper that I shall be shunned *»a a leper<~ Do there samo deur friends, know I now live under police observation ! They watch that we spread not our sorrows. O little pimple! Don't you wonder what you are ? We find the only disagreeable part of the disease is the restraint the Health Department has put upon us. Both "small-pox patients" have enjoyed perfect health throughout. I believe the " second case of small-pox in Dunedin" was looked upon as the most seri ous, the patient showing the ghastly symptoms of two diminutive pimples on her right arm, but they faded out in a day or so, and, strange to say, have so far left no sign of the muchdreaded " pitting." lam truly thankful I have not spread such a loathsome disease through Dunedin, for I went out and visited friends for two days after my arrival here on 12bh of May ; and the friends who had hourly intercourse with me went freely about for a week before we were quarantined. I knew when I landed I was suffering from a slight return of malarial fever, from which I suffered severely in the East, and it is considered a favourable sign by the doctors who are familiar with malaria when the patient shows varied and various sores and pimnles. But they don't call it" modified smallpox" in Singapore.—l am, etc.,

" Tbe Gbacohus Lady Passengek."