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St. Andrews Beacon, Aug. 1895The Fever is Raging
The golf fever in its most virulent form has attacked the hotel guests and has even extended among the strangers outside the bounds of the hotel. It makes no distinction of class or profession. The clergymen have it quite as bad as the lawyers, and the lawyers have it as bad as the doctors, and all the other professions are similarly affected. Even the women are not exempt from it, some of the latter having the fever very bad.
In its early stages, the patient evinces a desire to carry a stick with a crook on the business end of it. Then he wants to strike something with the aforesaid stick. As the disease becomes acute he throws off the ordinary habiliments of man, and dons knee breeches and queer sorts of leg adornments. Coats are cast aside, shirt sleeves are rolled up, and all day long through cold or heat, with the perspiration rolling down his face and trickling in dusty streams under his shirt band, he pounds an innocent little ball, not much bigger than a quinine pill, over a ten-acre field, chasing it out of one hole into another and endeavouring with each stroke to force it farther on its journey. If he can corner it in a bed of thistles or among a pile of rocks he takes special delight in hammering the poor thing out of its hiding place.
There are other symptoms in connection with the disease, but these are most prominent, and render a diagnosis of it very easy. The only remedy for it seems to be an application of snow to the affected spot, but as such can only be obtained in the winter season, the disease must be permitted to run itself until then. The patient must be kept cool and as his appetite becomes very vigorous it is absolutely necessary that he should be well dieted. By carrying out these instructions the disease can be kept pretty well in check until the cold weather sets in. There is grave danger, however, that if grip does not get its work in the meantime the patient will have a more malignant attack the following season.