This is exactly right.

On one burning day in April in a village in Bihar, Susheela Devi was worried about her sick child.

Her decision to seek medical help required brave determination.

There was the overpowering heat through which she would have to walk,

carrying her sick child most of the eight miles to the government health center.

The child was ill but not emergency ill in any of the two familiar life threatening ways.

The acute fever and coma of childhood malaria, the rapid wasting diarrhea and death of cholera,

or the labored gasping of pneumonia.

It was merely that the child seemed to sunwet feverish this past month and was becoming emaciated,

despite a reasonably good appetite, with a distended abdomen.

The young doctor was brusque, unfriendly, and uncommunicative.

He told Susheela to put her frightened child on the bare wooden examination table.

To the doctor, the constellation of science and symptoms could point to only one diagnosis.

The prolonged fever, the greatly enlarged liver and spleen, the anemia, the serum that jelled when mixed with formaldehyde,

all meant visceral leshmoneisis.

Realizing the gravity of what he was about to tell Susheela, his pomposity fell away.

Mother, he said gently, your child is very ill with cholera azar.

It does not mean death, your child can be cured.

You must buy medicine, then you must come here every day for twenty days so the nurse can inject the medicine.

How much is it, Susheela asked fearfully?

For you I will give you a bottle of the drug, enough for her whole treatment, for 300 rupees, about $15.

It was an astronomical sum, more than the family's income for some months.

...