46 THE ESSEX NATURALIST
marsh lands and inland creeks of mud and salt water of the Essex
side of the river Thames, may in some more favoured localities,
have partly modified the fever of which I complain. But I have
a lively remembrance of the fever and its evils, for I, more than
once I believe, had narrowly escaped from its constantly recurring
and weakening effects even on the strongest constitutions. The
usual remedy prescribed by our medical advisers was frequent
doses of Quinine or Jesuits' Bark and, when obtainable, some
forty-year-old Port wine. But one cure suggested to me was to
swallow a tablespoonful of gunpowder, and immediately after to
take violent exercise, i.e., run a few miles, and so get into a
violent perspiration. One person to whom I related this gun-
powder cure rather ridiculed it, and suggested that undoubtedly
the most complete remedy for the ague would be to fill one's
mouth with gunpowder and then set a lighted match to it! It
was customary in my Essex days to avoid going out of doors after
sunset for an hour or so; and windows used to be kept closed
about that period of the evening to keep out the aguish miasma
as it arose after sundown from the undrained marshy creeks and
lands surrounding the parish of Fobbing and its contiguous
villages".
Tabor returned to the same subject the following year and
considered "the reason suggested by the Rev. W. Gibbens for the
dimunition of ague during the last fifty years was hardly con-
clusive. "Has there", he asked, "really been such an improve-
ment in the drainage of the low-lying districts as he mentions?
One would rather think that during the last twenty years, owing
to the depressed state of agriculture, there has been deterioration.
As we know that in some places, as at Fambridge, the sea has re-
claimed its own, and what were formerly arable lands are now
dreary wastes of mud and ooze. Yet we hear of no increase in
ague".
In French's article, 'The Seaboard of Essex' (The Essex
Review, 1920), reference is made to tidal streams (one from the
north and the other from the south) that meet off our coast, and
the author stated, "this (meeting) must liberate a large quantity
of aqueous vapour, and the moisture appears to spread itself
pretty well equally over the Dengie Hundred. The atmosphere
there for weeks or months together appears to be saturated and is
often super-saturated. Perhaps it was due to that saturation
that ague for so long held its sway in the Dengie Hundred". That
was written in 1920.
Recently, The Essex Weekly News, to celebrate its centen-
ary, reproduced the front page of its first issue, whereon was an
advertisement for 'Holloway's Pills'—'the best remedy known in
the world for the following diseases—Ague, Asthma (and so on
through the alphabet) to Worms of all kinds, Weaknesses, &c,
&c'. These pills were sold not only by Professor Holloway, 244
Strand, but 'also by all respectable Druggists and Dealers in
Medicine throughout the civilised world'.