Altitude sickness was little understood in the early nineteenth century, and the inconsistency of symptoms led some to doubt a constant cause. This led to tensions when European travellers were forced to compare their bodily performance against their South Asian companions. This chapter begins by contextualising altitude sickness in relation to lowland colonial anxieties around health, acclimatisation and air. Next is a discussion of indigenous understandings of altitude and a consideration of the ways the performances of bodies were recorded in travel narratives. Finally, the chapter considers experimental approaches around quantification. The chapter argues that there was a politics of comparison that developed around altitude sickness at multiple scales: in the way bodies, European and South Asian, experienced altitude sickness; in the way comparisons affected interactions within expedition parties; in the way these were represented in written accounts to avoid upsetting supposed superiority; and in the way these ultimately constituted high mountains as aberrant environments in relation to lowland norms.

Chapter 4 exposes and explores the prevalence and movement of knowledge of the bark’s effectiveness in ‘fevers’ and other ailments occasioned by ‘insalubrious’, ‘febrile’ environs. Bark knowledge, the chapter contends, spread to various Atlantic localities not only in the form of imaginative stories or culinary practices, as the previous chapters have shown, but also in that of diagnostics, of expertise in indications for the bark and of a topographic literacy of sorts that associated even widely different environments with the same, familiar kind of ‘febrile’ threat. Men and women from all ranks across the Atlantic World and beyond, who inhabited or moved temporarily into ‘insalubrious’ environs, shared an understanding that their ability to preserve or restore bodily well-being was contingent on a litany of precautions and cares. Cinchona bark, this chapter contends, had become a fundamental element of that register by the late 1700s and early 1800s.