Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
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Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
I believe that children’s faces afford as good an index as any to the
healthfulness of a climate, and in no part of the world is there a more
active, rosy, and bright young community, than at Dorjiling. It is
incredible what a few weeks of that mountain air does for the
India-born children of European parents: they are taken there sickly,
pallid or yellow, soft and flabby, to become transformed into models of
rude health and activity.
There are, however, disorders to which the climate (in common with all
damp ones) is not at all suited; such are especially dysentery, bowel
complaints, and liver complaints of long standing; which are not
benefited by a residence on these hills, though how much worse they
might have become in the plains is not shown. I cannot hear that the
climate aggravates, but it certainly does not remove them. Whoever is
suffering from the debilitating effects of any of the multifarious
acute maladies of the plains, finds instant relief, and acquires a
stock of health that enables him to resist fresh attacks, under
circumstances similar to those which before engendered them.
Natives of the low country, and especially Bengalees, are far from
enjoying the climate as Europeans do, being liable to sharp attacks of
fever and ague, from which the poorly clad natives are not exempt. It
is, however, difficult to estimate the effects of exposure upon the
Bengalees, who sleep on the bare and often damp ground, and adhere,
with characteristic prejudice, to the attire of a torrid climate, and
to a vegetable diet, under skies to which these are least of all
adapted.
It must not be supposed that Europeans who have resided in the plains
can, on their first arrival, expose themselves with impunity to the
cold of these elevations; this was shown in the winter of 1848 and
1849, when troops brought up to Dorjiling were cantoned in newly-built
dwellings, on a high exposed ridge 8000 feet above the sea, and lay,
insufficiently protected, on a floor of loosely laid planks, exposed to
the cold wind, when the ground without was covered with snow.
Rheumatisms, sharp febrile attacks, and dysenteries ensued, which were
attributed in the public prints to the unhealthy nature of the climate
of Dorjiling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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