Yellow Fever in O'Brian's "The Commodore"

[damned_colonial]

I just read "Fever 1793" last week which is about Yellow Fever, and then this week I'm reading Patrick O'Brian's "The Commodore", part of the Aubrey-Maturin series, in which Stephen himself (the ship's surgeon) gets yellow fever from wandering around a river on an island off the west coast of Africa. (He thinks the cause is miasmata, incidentally, but of course it's spread by mosquitoes.)

Here's the scene from the book. Note the quotations which, knowing O'Brian, are from some period medical manual.

( They called it the black vomit, or sometimes yellow jack... )