Tropical Medicine

Problems of the Future.

Even should science succeed in finding a cure for every tropical disease, still other problems await solution. Can the individual be protected and enabled to work as efficiently as in a temperate zone? Can impairment of his vitality and nervous energy be prevented and normal health and longevity secured? Whether or not the tropics can be made a safe home for white settlers depends largely on the extent to which local administration will initiate and maintain effective and scientific systems of sanitation, and will educate the indigenous population into ways of cleanliness and order. Panama sanitary methods, dependent on abundant capital and a soldierly precision of enforcement, are possible only in limited and specially favoured areas. And in certain tropical localities it is notorious that the practice of sanitary law bears little relationship to the excellence of the principles embodied in the statute-book.

When all these difficulties have been faced and overcome, and the life of white settlers modified in matters of housing, diet, work and play to meet their altered physical environment, there re mains the great question : Can a white race settle permanently in a tropical country and after several generations still retain its original stamina and mental vigour? In spite of thousands of years of colonization this question still awaits a final answer.

Heretofore the results of disease—chronic malaria and ankylos tomiasis stunting body and mind—moral decay, consequent on association with lower or even debased native modes of life, have been confused inextricably with the effects of climate.

The unfavourable factor in tropical climates has been variously identified as the heat, or light, rays of the sun, the depressing monotony of an equable temperature, or a high relative humidity; the last admittedly trying, and affecting both comfort and ef ficiency. Even so, the individual can be trained to withstand a degree of temperature intolerable before acclimatisation, but whether continued exposure to such temperatures results in some subtle change in the nervous system, with loss of vigour and driv ing power, is a matter of dispute. Whatever the responsible agency, certainly some diminution in vitality commonly occurs, as is evidenced by the accepted practice of granting home leave to government servants and to staffs of business concerns, and this from no motives of philanthropy but because it pays.

(See also the articles ANTHROPOLOGY, APPLIED; COLOUR AND