Campylobacter

 One of the most exciting and unsettling things about Monopoly is picking up a Chance or Community Chest Card – perhaps the only exciting or unsettling thing about Monopoly other than winning or landing on a Mayfair with a hotel on it.

A few weeks ago, instead of winning a Beauty Contest, £50, facing a medical bill, or Going to Jail, I caught a stomach infection which introduced itself two weeks before our Anniversary.

 I’m an astute cove and knew something was wrong when I went to urinate and erupted front and back.  Bit like a sympathy strike—bowels and bladder unite! One out. All out!

It was horrible, like pale, lumpy tea but less fragrant. 

The doctor requested a sample, a reasonable enough request but not so easy to oblige, a bit like bottling Krakatoa in full flow. Now all I had to do was wait. The doctor might not cure it, but she’d tell me what it was. Comforting.

The historian in me half-hoped it was dysentery, putting me at one with the medieval archer at Agincourt. There, the English army was outnumbered by two to one. The outcome was grim. Dysentery was rife and the English archer fought with his pants down, torrential diarrhoea below, a torrent of arrows darkening the sky above. As the French knights charged, the archers stoically dipped arrowheads into their poo before letting fly. A nice touch. Altruistic too; what is ours is yours.

Dysentery also entered the Corn Law debates of 1846, Sir Robert Peel fighting to allow cheap corn into Ireland to offset the effects of diseased potatoes and famine. 

There is a passion and poetry here you don’t find in modern political debate:

“Are you to hesitate in averting famine because it possibly may not come? Good God…how much diarrhoea and bloody flux and dysentery (must) a people bear before it becomes necessary for you to provide them food!” 

Robert Peel pushed through his repeal of the Corn Laws and in doing so split his party, keeping them out of power for over twenty years.

For me then, dysentery has ‘bottom,’ history, a hinterland, but I didn’t have it. Three days later the results came back. Campylobacter

It was known in late Victorian times as cholera infantum —stool specimens of dead babies being a major source of study.  It can't be denied that Campylobacter has history, but one less adventurous, poetic or dynamic than dysentery.