Jeremy Clarke: ‘Can you part your cheeks a bit?’ I did so. There was a stunned silence

Sir Francis Drake died of dysentery while attacking the town of San Juan in Puerto Rico. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin. Henry V succumbed to it at 35. Accounts of the African missionary explorer David Livingstone’s lingering death from dysentery make grim reading. Near the end he was too weak to hold a pencil. He was found dead on his knees in prayer. Tough guy Ernest Hemingway had so many bowel movements in a short time he suffered a prolapse and afterwards went into a physical and mental decline. In Africa it is said to kill hundreds of thousands of children under five annually.

The first time I had dysentery, I had the watery, Shigellosis version. It visited me on a three-day hike up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Dysentery is inconvenient, apart from anything else. I ran out of toilet paper almost immediately and resorted afterwards to chapters torn from a paperback thriller, leaves and, above the tree line, smooth stones.