Genre:

Short Fiction, Serial

Subjects:

Disease, Epidemiology, Medical Practitioners, Piety, Psychology

    The narrator's father became ill having been soaked in a rain shower, but the narrator insisted on travelling to Barmouth with her godmother. Her father becoming much worse, with a 'decided putrid fever', she returned to find that two of her sisters had become infected by the same contagion and that she could not be admitted to the house (221). She stayed instead at the neighbouring cottage of an old woman who was 'by profession a nurse, and was actually at that time in attendance on her father' (222). In anxiety concerning the health of her father and sisters, and having meditated on biblical passages from the 'little red book', she became conscious of her religious duty. She was then 'taken ill with a complaint in the head' and her 'life was long despaired of' before she finally recovered (227).