The percentage of consumptives was enormous. Every family shuts its
windows and doors for the winter and proceeds industriously to spit, and
so the disease spreads.
Diphtheria patients rode and walked often for ten hours and waited in
the courtyard, and people far gone with typhus staggered along in the
blazing spring sun.
One jolly old ragatops with typhus arrived in the afternoon with a
violent temperature, and Jo settled him comfortably in the courtyard
with his head on a sink until Mrs. Berry should come in to see about
taking him into the barracks. He seemed quite happy about himself, but
very worried about his blind beggar brother and his two half-blind
children, whose sight had been ruined by smallpox.
For the latter nothing could be done.
Another time she kept two boys waiting to see if Mrs. Berry could take
them into her typhus barracks. One had scarlet fever, and the other was
a young starving clerk in a galloping consumption, thirty-six hours from
his home.
Afraid to raise their hopes, and not knowing if there would be room for
them, Jo told them that they were to have some very strong medicine that
could only be administered two hours after a dose of hot milk and
biscuit (the medicine was only bovril).
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