Unlike most Americans in 1898, forty-three year old zoologist, author, taxidermist, conservationist, and hunter, William T. Hornaday had spent considerable time in the tropics "collecting" wildlife specimens for Henry A. Ward's Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Ward sold the skins, bones, and sundry other materials collected by Hornaday and dozens of other young men to the nation's growing number of natural history museums. Honraday traveled and hunted extensively in Florida, Cuba, several smaller Caribbean islands, Venezuela, India, Malaysia, and Borneo between 1874 and 1879. Two Years in the Jungle, a memoir of his experiences in Asia, was published in 1886.
Like a patriotic American who believed his country was doing the correct thing in declaring war on Spain, Hornaday offered advice for better living in tropical conditions based on his own experiences. In one regard, though, he was either sugarcoating his own memory or being downright disingenuous in stating that his most debilitating experience had been "slight attacks of jungle fever" in India. In fact, as his letters from the times show, he suffered several crippling attacks. In one such instance, he survived thanks to the ministrations of a good samaritan. He offered his advice for the Cuba campaign in the pages of the New York Sun newspaper on May 22, 1898 (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1898-05-22/ed-1/seq-4/).
Here are his suggestions:
1. Sleep in a hammock. "This is for the very simple reason that the malarious exhalations from the earth, from the stagnant water and decaying vegetation, are densest and most dangerous at the surface of the ground." Hammocks had the added advantage of being handy for other purposes (i.e. carrying wounded), light, and easy to carry.
2. Use a mosquito shirt. By this he meant more of what we might think of as a screen that would create a tent over the hammock to keep mosquitos out during sleep.
3. Don't drink any water without boiling it first.
4. Wear a ventilated hat that has little or no direct contact with the head, such as a pith or cork helmet. He particularly warned against the wearing of felt or straw hats because they were too warm and invited heatstroke. One can see in images of the famous Rough Riders and other units that this advice was ignored.
5. Never rest or sleep in wet clothes. Therefore, always have a dry outfit wrapped in the rubber blanket in your pack to protect against dampness. He doesn't mention much else about clothing, i.e. no comments about wearing heavy wool uniforms during summer in a tropical environment. Nor does he state outright that a rubber blanket is a necessity.
6. Be temperate in habits. Don't eat too much meat. Don't eat any unripe fruits. Drinking alcohol sparingly. This is pretty standard thinking among the American middle class of the day. Bananas are the one food he recommended as being nutritious and tasty. I'm sure he didn't foresee the gross cans of meat that made soldiers violently ill.
7. You got it, keep the bowels open. And he recommended some sort of flannel bandage around the midsection for diarrhea. Sounds kinda like a diaper.
8. Lastly, don't overdo the quinine. His experience is that it was an effectiveness wore off with use. So, save it for when you really need it.
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