It wasn't brain fever.

For most of my life, I was under the impression that my mother had brain fever when she was seven years old. I’d heard the story a thousand times. As it turned out, she didn’t. But what she had was just as bad.

According to her, one morning she didn’t want to go to school. Her mother made her go, telling her to just go on, she’d feel better when she got there. So on to school she went, feeling worse by the minute. Finally, in the afternoon, she asked the teacher if she could go home early. Bad request. That got her slapped across the face by the teacher.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how a teacher could get away with that, remember that the year was 1912. Teachers were the absolute rulers of their classroom and got away with almost anything. All too often, if the parent found out that the teacher slapped or whipped their child, it was assumed to be justified and the child got it even worse from the parent.

Anyway, my mother made it to the end of the day and started walking home. Between her and the house was a park. Keep in mind that this wasn’t a park such as the ones we know today. No, this was basically in a natural, heavily wooded state with some cleared areas that had large barbeque pits dug into the ground. They also filled with water whenever you had a heavy rain. I know this because my mother talked about falling into one and her brother pulling her out by her hair (it was quite long) before she drowned.

Whether or not the pits were filled with water that day she was trying to make it home, I don't know. It really didn’t matter. If she’d even fallen into a dry pit, she’d died before anyone found her. As it was, she managed to make it thru the park and all the way to the house before she passed out. Her mother found her at the bottom of the steps.

Unconcious and her tongue clamped between her teeth, her mother got her to bed and called the doctor. When the doctor arrived, they finally managed to get her tongue back in her head, but then she clamped her teeth together, which made it impossible to give her any medicine orally, never mind food.

The doctor gave my grandmother a tongue-lashing for not having screens on the windows, telling her that he told her this was going to happen. Having made the obligatory health speech, he went back to tending my mother. Apparently he stayed at the house most of the time for the next two weeks. Since her teeth were clamped, the only medicine he could administer was Quinine injections in the hips. My mother said that her mother told her the doctor told her he hated to do it because my mother probably would never walk again.

Doctors are frequently wrong and he was wrong this time. After two weeks, my mother came to and started asking for something to eat. She never had any problem walking.

However, very late in my mother’s life, when we got to talking about that episode, I finally figured out what it was she had...and it wasn’t brain fever. You have to remember that in northeastern Mississippi you’re living in a very humid environment, in a house with no indoor plumbing, no electricity and no screens on the windows. Mosquitos and who knows what other insects and assorted critters could flit right into the house anytime they wanted. What my mother contracted...and you’ve probably gotten ahead of me...was pernicious malaria.

Figuring out what she had was the easy part. What I never have figured out is why none of the rest of the family ever came down with the disease. The only thing that makes any sense is that by living under those conditions, they developed an immune system capable of resisting most of the illnesses that were rampant in those days.

And that, in turn, brings another very interesting question. Is it possible that the reason we now have so many allergies and are so sensitive to disease is because we no longer are exposed to the dirt and what we now consider to be unsanitary conditions that were part of daily life for our ancestors?