An Alabama volunteer writes from one of the rebel camps:

“There’s a new disease broken out here – the “camp disease,” they call it.  The first symptom is a horror of gunpowder.  The patient can’t abide the smell of it, but is sieged with a nervous trembling of the knees, and a whiteness about the liver, and a longing inclination to advance backward.  That’s the way water serves mad dogs.  Then comes what our major calls home fever, and next the sufferer’s wife and nine children are taken sick; after which the poor fellow takes a collapse and then a relapse.  But it is mighty hard to get a discharge or even a furlough – awful hard.  Fact is you can’t do it without working the thing pretty low down.

“I tell you what, Bob, between you and me I’m afraid I’m taking the disease myself; I don’t like the reports we hear every day from the coast.  We hear cannon booming down there by the hour, and they say the Yankees are going to play the very devil with our ducks.  I think I can detect a faint smell of powder in the breeze, and feel a strange desire to go into some hole or other.  It may be the climate, I hope so, but don’t see how that should make me feel so cold about the haversack every time I see a bayonet.  If I had only some good spirits now, to take every morning, I think I could stand it very well.  Please send me some immediately upon receipt of this (N. B. – Mark the box “Drugs, care of Surgeon Second Batt. Ala. Vols’.)  Our Major is as sharp as a brier and down on brandy like a duck on a Junebug.”

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 1, 1862, p. 2