I am now under a strict regimen, and shall set out to-morrow for Williamsburg to receive the advice of the best physician there.  My constitution is certainly greatly impaired, and ... nothing can retrieve it, but the greatest care and the most circumspect conduct.”  It was in this journey that he met his future wife, and either she or the doctor cured him, for nothing more is heard of his approaching “decay.”

In 1761 he was attacked with a disease which seems incidental to new settlements, known in Virginia at that time as the “river fever,” and a hundred years later, farther west, as the “break-bone fever,” and which, in a far milder form, is to-day known as malaria.  Hoping to cure it, he went over the mountains to the Warm Springs, being “much overcome with the fatigue of the ride and weather together.  However, I think my fevers are a good deal abated, although my pains grow rather worse, and my sleep equally disturbed.  What effect the waters may have upon me I can’t say at present, but I expect nothing from the air—­this certainly must be unwholesome.  I purpose staying here a fortnight and longer if benefitted.”  After writing this, a relapse brought him “very near my last gasp.  The indisposition ... increased upon me, and I fell into a very low and dangerous state.  I once thought the grim king would certainly master my utmost efforts, and that I must sink, in spite of a noble struggle; but thank God, I have now got the better of the disorder, and shall soon be restored, I hope, to perfect health again.”

During the Revolution, fortunately, he seems to have been wonderfully exempt from illness, and not till his retirement to Mount Vernon did an old enemy, the ague, reappear.  In 1786 he said, in a letter, “I write to you with a very aching head and disordered frame....  Saturday last, by an imprudent act, I brought on an ague and fever on Sunday, which returned with violence Tuesday and Thursday; and, if Dr. Craik’s efforts are ineffectual I shall have them again this day.”  His diary gives the treatment:  “Seized with an ague before 6 o’clock this morning after having laboured under a fever all night—­Sent for Dr. Craik who arrived just as we were setting down to dinner; who, when he thought my fever sufficiently abated gave me cathartick and directed the Bark to be applied in the Morning.  September 2.  Kept close to the House to day, being my fit day in course least any exposure might bring it on,—­happily missed it September 14.  At home all day repeating dozes of Bark of which I took 4 with an interval of 2 hours between.”

With 1787 a new foe appeared in the form of “a rheumatic complaint which has followed me more than six months, is frequently so bad that it is sometimes with difficulty I can raise my hand to my head or turn myself in bed.”

During the Presidency Washington had several dangerous illnesses, but the earliest one had a comic side.  In his tour through New England in 1789, so Sullivan states, “owing to some mismanagement in the reception ceremonials at Cambridge, Washington was detained a long time, and the weather being inclement, he took cold.  For several days afterward a severe influenza prevailed at Boston and its vicinity, and was called the Washington Influenza.”  He himself writes of this attack:  “Myself much disordered by a cold, and inflammation in the left eye.”