A MYSTERIOUS FEVER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6132, 19 March 1898, Page 2

A MYSTERIOUS FEVER.

[By W. L. Aldek.] (Fall Mall Magazine.) When 1 was living next door to Prof 63sor Van Wagener, in New Berlinopolisville, said the Colonel, he sent for me one morning, and asked me if I would sleep in his house for two or three nights. You see, Mrs Tan Wagener had been spending the winter in St Louis, and the Professor wanted to go and fetch her home. The burglar industry in our town had been pretty brisk during the winter, and the Professor judged that it would not be quite safe to leave the house with nobody in it except the servants. Of course I had no objection to doing as my old friend wished, and so, about fonr o'clock in the afternoon, I saw th.9 Professor safely in his train at the railway station, and then walked up to his house and took possession of it. Van Wagener had been busy with a new invention that winter, but for a wonder he had not told me anything about it. However, as he went about with hia fingers wrapped up in rags, and his clothes were developing new grease spots every day, I knew by the symptoms that some new invention was in progress. He said to me, when I put him in the train, that ho had a little surprise waiting for me at the house, which he rather thought would please me, but he did not go into any details about it. He might have meant that his surprise was a dinner thrtt a Christian could eat — which, considering that Van Wagener generally ordered his dinner himself, and gave the orders to a constitutionally drunken cook, would have been a first-class surprise; ov he might have wished me to understand that for once he had invented something which was not a failure. However, I did not pay much attention to what he said, for I had learned by experience that the loss attention you pay to scientific men the better will be your chances of keeping clear of mischief. I had my dinner all alone in Van Wagoner's dining-room that night, and there wasn't anything in the least surprising about it. It began with roast chicken that wasn't cooked through, and then it came to a sudden end with soup, made of some unearthly sort of chemical composition that Van Wagener had invented, and that according to him contained more nourishment to the cubic foot than any other substance ever eaten either by a human being or a man of science. That was juat about the sort of dinner that Van Wagener usually gave me when his wife was away, and , it made me admire the toughness of tba man who had eaten such dinners for nearly four months without dying of starvation and poison combined. I didn't eat very much, and what I did eat didn't seem to reconcile itself to its situation. So, after smoking a great deal more than was good for me, I locked up the house and went to bed. It was a bitter cold night, and I could not see that there was any fire in my bedroom, though the room was fairly warm. Now, I don't care to sleep in a warm room, and in point of fact I always sleep with the window open, no matter how cold the weather may be ; but I never could reconcile myself to the idea of getting into a cold bed. I knew that Van Wagener had a prejudice against warming-pans, for I had once heard him denounce them as grossly unscientific, but I wished all the same that I had brought ray warming-pan with me, so that I could have taken a little of the chill off the sheets. When I finally got into bed I was surprised to find that it wa3 beautifully warm. This was a pleasant surprise, though I did not at the time connect it with the Professor's remark about the surprise that he had prepared for me. I supposed that the cook had accidentally been betrayed into a little fit of sobriety, and had fished out I a warming-pan from the Professor's garret and made my bed „ comfortable. The warmth made me sleepy, and while I wa3 still thinking of the surprising fact that a man could actually be comfortable in Van Wagener'a house— that is, provided Van Wagener himself was out of it, and no inventions were in progress— l fell sound asleep. • I l T°i ie " p some time in the middle of the mght fee ing as if I had been sleeping in the stokehole of an Indian steamer in July, under a pile of heavy tarpaulins. . I never remember to have felt so hot in the whole course of my life as I felt thafc ni w j was simply bathed in perspiration, and the sheets felt hot to the touch. As I have said, there was no fire i n the room, and I could see by the moonlight that the

window wa3 wide open, and that the snow had drifted into the room during the night. It was therefore clear enough to my mind that I was in a tremendous fever, and that in all probability Van Wagoner's patent soup that I had eaten at dinner had poisoned me. There was nobody in the house except the cook and the chambermaid, both of whom would have refused to go ont in the middle of a cold winter's night in search of a doctor. So I just made up my mind to Avait till morning, and then, if I should happen to be alive, to send for the nearest doctor and find out what my chances might be. I needn't say that there was no more sleep for me. As far as I could judge, my temperature was about a hundred and five, though it seemed to be about a hundred and fifty. I longed to throw off the bedclothes and to get up and roll in the snow that was sprinkled on the floor under the window, but I did not dare to take such liberties with my fever. What I dreaded more than anything else was that when the doctor should arrive he would find me delirious. I worked hard that night to keep my mind in training, by thinking out sums in arithmetic without a slate, and trying to recollect all the different beds that I had slept in since I was a child. I managed to hold on to my reason ; and when daylight finally came, and I had made a servant understand that if she didn't fetch a doctor without any more delay there would be a corpse in the house beforn noon, I had the comfort of knowing that the doctor would not find a gibbering idiot in my bed. My own family doctor was out of town, and his substitute came to see me. This was a young man who had just come to New Berlinopolisville, and had been a volunteer surgeon in the army. I didn't much like the look of him, and when he mentioned that he had been with the army on the plains I was more dissatisfied than over. All an army surgeon Imows, as a rule, is how to cut off a leg, or probe a bullet wound ; and if, when you have an attack of diphtheria or brain fever, you call in an army surgeon, the chances are that he will amputate your leg and probe the inside of your brain, before he has been i in the house five minutes. As it happened, this young fellow was more enterprising than most army men, and he had invented a remedy for chills and fever which he believed to be infallible. It was less trouble to give a patient this remedy than it was to perform a surgical operation, so that on the whole the young doctor wasn't what an insurance company would call extra-hazardous in a sickroom. He listened to my symptoms, and felt my pulse, and told me that I had the worst . attack of chills and fever that he had ever met. I told him about the dinner I had eaten the night before, and my suspicions that it might have poisoned me; but he wouldn't hear of it. "You've got chills and fever, and nothing else," he said; " and mighty lucky you are to have it. I never yet saw a case of chills and fever that I couldn't collar and throw in three rounds. You take my renmdy three times, and you'll feel as cool as if you were searching for the North Pole." Well, I took his remedy ; and mighty unpleasant it was, but it didn't seem to catch on to the disease. I wasn't a bit cooler when the doctor came to see me that evening than I had been when ho called in the moraine:, and I had taken his medicine four times instead of three. He was a very free-spoken young man for a, doctor, and he didn't hesitate to ..say that he'd be everlasting darned if he could understand why his remedy hadn't got its work on. So far as he and I could judge, my fever was as high as ever; .but when the doctor tested me with his thermometer, which he had forgotten to do in the morning, he found that my temperature was only about two-tenths higher than it ought to have been. This filled him with astonishment, and he told me that I was one of the most interesting and important cases that hehad over known, and that before he and the fever should get through with me, I could count upon rendering invaluable service to science. It being very clear that the doctor's great remedy for chills and fever wouldn't work in my case, he decided to try quiniue, and as a starter he made mo take thirty grains. Now, I can take about as much quinine as any man living, having been brought up in a region where every inhabitant lays in his supply ofquinine by the hundredweight. But when the doctor had given me the third dose of thirty grains within six hours, I told him that if it was all the same to him I would prefer the fever. Seeing that I was obstinate, he said that there was so much excitement in , my nervous system that he would calm it down with a little assafcetida, and thereupon he began tn shovel that cheerful drug into me. He sent an Irishman to sit up with me that night, and to give me my medicine regularly, which the man did until I could stand it no longer. I sent out for two bottles of whisky, and by the time the Irishman had finished them he had forgotten all about my medicine, and I managed to get a few moments of quiet sleep. The doctor was ou hand bright and early the next morning, and he didn't seem at all discouraged when he found that I was as hot as ever. He told me that, having exhausted the resources of science so far as medicines were concerned, he should now fall back on surgery, and | that he hadn't the least doubt that he could cure me with a single operation. When I asked him Avhat the operation was, he said, as I expected he would, that he intended to amputate my left leg at the ! knee-joint. Ho assured me that, before the invention of his great anti-chills and fever remedy, which had so unaccountably failed to work in my case, he had always treated bad cases of malarial fever in the army by amputation of either the right or left leg, and that he had hardly over failed to be completely successful. I had now been suffering from my remarkable fever for nearly forty-eight hours, and I was so annoyed about it that I would have endured almost any operation that would have been certain of curing me. Nevertheless, I had a prejudice against losing a leg, and I hadn't the slightest belief that it would do me any good, so I told the doctor that I must respectfully decline' to undergo the operation. He argued the matter for some time, and finally he took the ground that I was delirious and unfit to have any opinion whatever concerning my own case. "My dear Colonel," he said, " you're a first-class man when you are in your senses, but just now you are deliriouß, and I'm not going to allow any lunatic, temporary or permanent, to dictate to me. It's my duty as a medical man to take off your leg, and if s coming off, no matter what you think or wish about the matter." I saw he was determined, and I cast a hasty glance round the room, to see if there was such a thing as a revolver handy. Of course there wasn't : Van Wagener kept his house full of scientific apparatus, but he had no idea of keeping anything roally useful about him. I knew I was too weak to grapple with the doctor, and when I saw him get out his instruments I felt that my chances of holding on to my leg were mighty slim. "Doctor," said I, "if you have made up your mind to amputate my leg, I wish you would have the goodness to explain to me how the operation can possibly be a remedy for chills and fever." I needn't say that I didn't have the least curiosity to know what the doctor's views were ; but, so far as I could see, my only chance was to delay the operation, in the hope that somebody would come to my assistance. "It's irregular," said the doctor, "for a physician to explain the action of his remedies to a patient. However I will make an exception in your case, Colonel. The way of it is this. Amputating a leg reduces the fever, because it reduces the) quantity of blood in the patients veins. Then again, the shock to the nervous system makes the disease feel sort of discouraged and weak, and m nine cases out of ten it hasn't force enough to stand up against a good dose of quinine. You just tiust to meS I've cut off seven hundred and twenty-two legs in my time, and yoti caa just bet your bottom dollar that I know my business." By this time the doctor had got every-

thing in readiness, and he came towards the bed with the intention of choosing out the more attractive leg to operate on. Just at that moment the door opened, and ■ Van Wagener cauio into the room. I was ! never so glad to se« a man in my life as I was to see the Professor. "What's all this, Colonel?" said he. "They tell me you have a fever." "A very bad case of typho-malarial fever," said the doctor. "I'm just on the point of operating on him." " He's going to cut my leg off, I cried. "For Heaven's sake, Van Wagener, turn the brute out of the room." The Professor didn't wait to hear any explanations. He knew me, and he was ready to take my word against all the doctors in Illinois. He bundled the doctor out of the room in no time, and then he took hold of my hand and -asked me to tell him all my symptoms. I had just begun to tell him about the sudden and mysterious fever that had attacked me, when he jumped up, and, going to the head of the bed, exclaimed, "I thought so! How awfully careless I have been ! " Then he came back to me, and said, " It's all right, my dear Colonel. You haven't had the least particle of fever. I accidentally left my new bed-warming apparatus in action, and that is what has been heating you for the last two days. . I give you my word that in ten minutes you will be as cool and comfortable as you ever were in yonr life," "Do you mind telling me what you are talking about?" I asked. "What do you mean by your bed-warming apparatus?" " What I mean is this," he replied ; "as I have often told you, a warming-pan or a hot bottle is a miserably inadequate and unscientific, meaus of warming a bed. Now, my new bed-warming apparatus is both effectual, as you know by experience, and thoroughly scientific. About three inches below the wire mattress on which you are lying is a sort of gas-stove, that occupies the whole width of the bed, and is furnished witii twenty-one small gasjets. When these are lighted the bed is thoroughly warmed, no matter how ; cold the weather may be, or how many windows you may have open. I told the chambermaid to light up the gas half an hour before you went to bed, and she didn't have sense enough to turn it off again. The consequence is that the gas stove has been heating your bed up to a temperature of about 130deg Fahrenheit over since you got into it. The only wonder is that everything about the bed did not become dry enough and hot enough to take fire. It was all my fault, for I ought to have given the girl particular directions to turn out the gas ; but I was naturally a little disturbed in my mind, for I was expecting to meet Mrs Van Wagener in the course of a few hours, and 1 knew she would ask me if the house was clean and in good order ; and that sort of thing always " " I suppose you meant this scientific bed- warming apjtaratus of yours as a pleasant surprise for me ?" I said, interrupting my. friend in his rather long explanation. " Precisely so," replied the Professor eagerly. " I really meant to make you comfortable, and I apologise most sincerely for the discomfort youhave undergone." " Considering that you ho,ppened to comeback in timeltosave my legf, I will forgive you," I said. "But, Professor! the next time I come to spend a night in your house, I'm going to bring my own dinner, my own bed, and a private policeman to stand guard over me. Now, you just get me a bottle of the best Kentucky tonic — Scotch will do if you haven't any Kentucky — and I'll get up and shoot that doctor." "I didn't shoot him after all," remarked the Colonel, after a short pause. " I sent him word that I would call on him with my gun, and amputate his leg with a 44---calibre bullet. But ho didn't wait for me : he had a sudden call to California, and I never heard of him from that day to this."