Rinderpest, a highly contagious and very destructive disease of horned cattle, was introduced in 1888 and spread like fire in prairie grass.

No real effort was made to check it prior to the American occupation, and it caused enormous losses, both directly by killing large numbers of beef cattle and indirectly by depriving farmers of draft animals.
When I first visited the islands every member of our party fell ill within a few weeks.

All of us suffered intensely from tropical ulcers.

Two had malaria; one had dysentery; one, acute inflammation of the liver, possibly of amoebic origin; and so on to the end of the chapter.

I myself got so loaded up with malaria in Mindoro that it took me fifteen years to get rid of it.
Fortunately the American army of occupation brought with it numerous competent physicians and surgeons, and abundant hospital equipment and supplies, for the soldiers promptly contracted about all the different ailments to be acquired in the islands.
When I arrived in Manila on the 5th of March, 1899, I found that a great army hospital, called the "First Reserve," had been established in the old rice market.