OP Y.
Enclosure/
C
Sir,
511
1909.
Hongkong, 30th August, 1
C.C.
33788
RESS Per 14 OCT 09
I have the honour to ask you to submit the following circumstances regarding my health to the consideration of His Excellency the Governor, with a view to an enquiry as to whether I may be invalided from the Service and permitted to return to the home climate.
My decision to make this request has been taken on a recrudescence of the inflammatory mouth condition for which you kindly treated me two months ago. I have suffered more or less all the time since then from soreness and ulcers of the mucous membrane of the mouth; and this complicating my chronic tendency to morning diarrhoea seems to me so serious a threatening of sprue, that I consider I ought to leave this climate permanently. Throughout this summer, while I have managed to keep at my work, I have been the subject of an undue exhaustion in the evenings that has been almost prostration.
As you are aware, for many years I have suffered from a morning diarrhoea in the summer months that has involved special dieting and produced low health as each summer has gone on. So long ago as 1901, I had to take special leave for ill-health dependent on this, and made a round trip to England to recruit. Other periods of home leave have been on the ground of "service", but have been more frequent on account of my health requirements. In 1906 I was granted sick leave to go up the China coast, because of diarrhoea and its results.
When I went on leave on 5th October, 1907, I continued to suffer from the diarrhoea I had had all the summer until I actually reached Europe, with