Cholera left Tesla bedridden for nine months after he finished high school. He graduated in Karlovac in 1873, returned to his family home in Smiljan, and soon contracted the disease.
Tesla later described the illness as life-threatening, saying he came close to death several times. His recovery became a turning point in his life. While he was gravely ill, his father, Milutin Tesla, abandoned his earlier wish that Nikola enter the priesthood and promised to send him to study engineering if he survived.
The illness is often mixed up with malaria, another disease associated with Tesla’s youth and with the marshy Karlovac area. Malaria was a separate episode; the prolonged post-school illness that confined him to bed was cholera.
After recovering, Tesla spent time recuperating in the countryside near Tomingaj. He later entered the Polytechnic in Graz, beginning the technical education that preceded his electrical work in Europe and the United States.