In these early months malaria was a comparatively straightforward fever. Though it seldom ran quite according to the book, we did have quinine to treat it. The short-lived, more violent Dengue Fever, left one more exhausted. There were tens of thousands of the dengue carrying Tiger mosquitoes about, and against them was perpetual war.

Then there were the so-named avitaminoses, or Vitamin Deficiency diseases, and to the lay mind they seemed to be of two types. The first made your joints swell and ache till life was an absolute misery, and the second brought on all sorts of dermatites on the body and private parts, causing horrible glandular swellings and maddening irritation that when scratched promptly went ‘busok’ – rotten. There were so many of these diseases, plus normal beri-beri, that it was deemed insufficient to enter hospital with them.

Nightly, these men, with the pains of the devil in their swollen toe and finger joints, would be walking up and down till the following dawn, quite unable to sleep or keep lying down. They got terribly thin and weak. After a long time we were allowed to buy ‘rice polishings’, a powder made from the crushed-up dry husks of rice, and these were full of the ‘B’ vitamins. Gradually the rice polishings brought relief, but the basic diet remained the same as before.

Lastly, out of a blue sky, came a few cases of typhoid and an outbreak of diphtheria. The trouble with the diphtheria was that there was no serum with which to fight it and the mortality was rather high. It also infected ulcers and sores, and a special ward had to be isolated off, full of these stinking, greenish things. The only method that the doctors could use to beat the increase in the disease, was to make a serum from the blood of patients who recovered.

These diseases were always with us. Against the pattern of all camp life outside, there was always the sombre background of the hospital. Sometimes only 10 per cent were affected; later on it would rise to over 90 per cent. Against these illnesses the doctors waged a magnificent battle and achieved results that often staggered themselves. They learnt a lot from post mortems, and they were also compelled to experiment with remedies which had before the war been considered dangerous.