Lingering Fever: A World War II Nurse’s Memoir

In 1945, the author found herself in the monsoon-drenched jungles of Assam, caring for soldiers in the China-Burma-India theater of war in a thatched-roof hospital that had few modern facilities. Nothing in her nurse’s training had prepared her for the tropical diseases her patients faced, nor had her experiences readied her for a hospital where men spat on the floor, rats were pervasive, and patients, who used their handguns to chase gigantic cockroaches, were as likely to sell their medicine as swallow it. What made the experience tolerable was Nurse Camp’s romance with one of the airmen who flew the Hump, supplying O.S.S. troops behind Japanese lines and carrying General Joseph Stillwell’s Chinese troops to fight the battle of North Burma. She accompanied her future husband on some of his missions, flying over the treacherous mountains to China and down to Calcutta. Based, in part, on letters she wrote to her parents, this is the poignant story of one nurse’s experience in World War II and how her service changed her life forever.