Search Results

This chapter presents Dick and Tally Simpsonsʼ wartime letters to their family in South Carolina dated from April to August 1862. These letters contained nothing specific except that Tally made the decision to re-enlist. Dick, who was suffering from chronic dysentery, was not able to re-enlist and decided to just let his time run out so that he could join a cavalry company being formed in the Pendleton area. However, Dick was given an honorable discharge on July 11, 1862 on account of bad health.

The author discusses his birth and parentage, the death of his father, how his mother finds an asylum with his uncle, famine and the persecution of his cousins, his mischievous habits, the tank of Dháránagar where his cousins attempt to drown him, a good samaritan named Rájárám, a new cure for dysentery, and the end of his childhood.

This chapter focuses on Henry the Young King's war with his younger brother Richard for control of Aquitaine. It first considers the Young King's quarrel with Richard over the latter's construction of a castle, Clairvaux, before discussing his secret league with the lords of Aquitaine against Richard. It then examines Henry II's authorization of young Henry to take military action against Richard, along with young Henry's siege of Limoges, his role as intermediary between rebels in Limoges and Henry II, and his objection to the episcopal election of Walter of Coutances. It also explores the Young King's pillage of Grandmont and other monasteries of the Limousin, pilgrimage to Rocamadour, and illness caused by dysentery.

A parasite is an organism that lives on or in a host and gets its food from or at the expense of its host. Worms or helminths either live as parasites or free of a host in aquatic and terrestrial environments. Parasites and worms are found worldwide but mainly in the tropics. It is estimated that 20% of immigrants from endemic countries may have helminthic infections at their arrival to the UK. These people could be asymptomatic, but tend to present with unexplained symptoms, especially gastrointestinal in nature or eosinophilia. Travellers to endemic countries tend to be newly infected and have greater immune response and pronounced eosinophilia in some but not all parasitic infections. Parasites that can cause disease in humans fall under three classes: protozoa, helminths, and Ectoparasites Protozoa are microscopic, one- celled organisms that can be free living or parasitic in nature. Transmission of protozoa that live in a human’s intestine to another human typically occurs through a faeco-oral route (for example, contaminated food or water, or person- to-person contact). Protozoa that live in the blood or tissue of humans are transmitted to other humans by an arthropod vector (for example, through the bite of a mosquito or sand fly). Helminths are large, multicellular organisms that are generally visible to the naked eye in their adult stages. Like protozoa, helminths can be either free living or parasitic. There are three main groups of helminths that parasitize humans: cestodes, trematodes, and nematodes. These are flat worms that comprise Echinococcus species: intestinal tapeworms and neurocysticercosis (Taenia solium) These are leaf- shaped, and they vary in length from a few millimetres to 8 cm. They include: ■ Liver fluke: Clonorchis sinensis, Fasciola hepatica ■ Intestinal fluke: Fasciola buski, Heterophyes heterophyes, ■ Lung fluke: Paragonimus westernmani ■ Blood flukes: Schistosoma species These are cylindrical in structure. Blood- sucking arthropods such as mosquitoes are considered as ectoparasites because they depend on blood meal for their survival. Narrowly speaking, ectoparasites include organisms like ticks, fleas, lice, and mites (scabies) that attach or burrow into the skin and remain there for relatively long periods of time (e.g. weeks to months).

The gastro-intestinal tract (GIT) hosts the most numerous and diverse reservoir of microbes in humans. There is increasing interest in the relationship between the GIT microbiome and human health. Obesity, diabetes, allergy, and a number of inflammatory diseases have been linked with the human GIT microbiome. Infections of the GIT arise either as a result of a change in the relationship between the commensal microbes colonizing the GIT (endogenous infection) or entry in to the GIT of a micro-organism which causes disease (exogenous infection). Commensals most commonly invade host tissues as a result of compromised defensive barriers. Disease associated with exogenous infection can be toxin-mediated, or associated with local or systemic invasion of the host. Endogenous infections are usually polymicrobial. In the mouth the aetiology, presentation, and anatomical associations have led to the description of a number of syndromes. Peritonsillar infection with involvement of the internal jugular vein is Lemierre’s syndrome, which is particularly associated with infection with Fusobacterium necrophorum. ‘Trench mouth’ is a severe form of ulcerative gingivitis, so named because in the absence of oral hygiene it was a relatively common diagnosis among those in the trenches during the First World War. Ludwig’s angina is a severe infection of the floor of the mouth which spreads in to the submandibular and sub-lingual space, often following a tooth-related infection. Deep neck infections are more common in children than adults and can involve the parapharyngeal, retropharyngeal, peri-tonsillar, or sub-mandibular spaces. Children with deep neck infections are more likely than adults to present with cough and respiratory distress. Oesophagitis has a wide range of potential aetiologies. Fungi (particularly Candida species) are probably the most common microbial cause of oesophagitis. Fungal infection of the distal oesophagus is thought to play an important role in the pathogenesis of disseminated fungal infection. Risk factors for fungal infection include poor oral intake, exposure to antibiotics, immunocompromise (HIV, steroids, cancer treatments), gastric acid suppressants, and damage to mucosal integrity (naso-gastric tubes, acid reflux, varices). Bacteria (including Mycobacteria, Actinomycetes, Treponemes), parasites, and viruses (herpes simplex, cytomegalovirus) are rarer infectious causes of oesophagitis.

Sylvester Judd died in 1860 at seventy years of age, just before he completed his history of Hadley, Massachusetts. Judd had lived through the transformation of his community from a small rural village where people fished massive runs of salmon and shad each spring, to an industrial center seated on the banks of a polluted river. One of his motivations for writing his history was to capture that fast-disappearing older world. It was a world where lawyers, shopkeepers, journalists, and farmers (and Judd had been three of those four) knew how to cut timber, kill and clean a turkey, catch fish, butcher a pig, tend a garden, work an orchard, and make cider. By the time of Judd’s death, wood was sold already cut into cordwood or milled to clapboards, meat was butchered at the abattoir, and cloth was woven in mills. It was a world that could not be brought back through his history, but one that Judd hoped through his history might at least be remembered. On July 24, 1882, when Theodore Lyman went before the people of his district to run for Congress, he reminded them that when he was a boy (then, Judd was in his fifties), the region’s industry had already begun to grow, although many of the state’s residents were still rural farmers. Yet by the time Lyman ran for Congress, a majority of the people of Massachusetts found their homes and their jobs in towns and cities. The world that Judd saw fading in the 1850s was indeed a thing of memory for some of those listening to Lyman in 1882. New England of the 1880s was a place, as Lyman noted, of “manufacturing towns with . . . sickly smells.” Yet without this progress, according to him, New England would have remained a place of “a few grist-mills here and there and houses whose occupants raised such crops as they could from the scanty soil.” If, by 1882, the people of New England had lost their more direct contact with the resources of nature, for many, the romanticized memory of that intimacy lingered on.