Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man – for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders – was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy

this speedy turnaround proved too slow for most of the sick, the Hector losing its captain, its master and its master’s mate not to mention ‘common men’.

But he now died, the first of many to succumb to Bantam’s lethal combination of enteric amoebae and malarial mosquitoes.