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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be taken seriously or in jest, and the 

 editorial remarks upon the subject have, 

 therefore, varied from the serious to 

 the sarcastic. The following are the 

 facts of the case, as learned by the 

 Popular Science Monthly from a 

 reliable source. 



The Eber's Papyrus, an Egyptian 

 manuscript, about 3,500 years old, de- 

 scribed a tropical malady as the 

 'AAA' or the ' U H A ' disease, which 

 is characterized by an extreme anemia, 

 pains in the abdomen, palpitation of 

 the heart, and certain other symptoms. 

 This same disease is described by vari- 

 ous authors in the eighteenth century, 

 but its cause was not discovered until 

 1843, when Dubini, of Milan, found a 

 parasitic, roundworm which inhabits 

 the intestine and which he named 

 Anchylostoma duodenale. This worm 

 belongs to the strongyles and is closely 

 related to the ' hookworm,' Uncinaria 

 vulpis, described by Frolich in 1789. 



It has been thoroughly established 

 that Dubini's hookworm sucks the 

 blood and produces a poison; also that 

 it causes the conditions known under 

 the various names of St. Gothard 

 anemia, miner's anemia, brickmaker's 

 anemia, Egyptian chlorosis, uncinaria- 

 sis, ankylostomiasis, etc. This dis- 

 ease is known to be very prevalent in 

 tropical countries, but curiously enough 

 no positive case in the United States 

 was recognized as such until 1893, 

 when Dr. Blickman, of St. Louis, found 

 a German who had brought the infec- 

 tion with him from Europe. Dr. Stiles, 

 zoologist of the Public Health and 

 Marine Hospital Service, has main- 

 tained for eight or ten years that this 

 disease must be more or less common 

 in the southern portion of this country, 

 and that physicians have undoubtedly 

 confused it with malaria. This view, 

 which he has repeatedly defended before 

 medical and scientific audiences, has 

 been looked upon as extreme and has 

 not been adopted by the American prac- 

 titioners. Isolated cases of the disease 

 were reported occasionally, but between 



1892 and 1902 only about 35 cases 

 were found in the United States, and 

 most of these were imported. Dr. 

 Ashford had, however, shown that the 

 disease is common in Porto Rico. In 

 May, 1902, Dr. Stiles obtained the 

 parasites from three cases which oc- 

 curred respectively in Virginia, Galves- 

 ton and Porto Rico, and he showed that 

 they were not identical with the para- 

 site which causes miner's anemia in the 

 Old World. He described this new 

 worm as Uncinaria americana, and 

 using Virginia, Galveston and Porto 

 Rico as the three angles of a triangle, 

 he maintained that this area must 

 harbor a more or less common disease 

 caused by the new parasite. In Sep- 

 tember, 1902, he started out to demon- 

 strate the correctness of this view and 

 in eight weeks time he proved his point. 



The extreme and in some cases non- 

 sensical statements made by the daily 

 press have been startling, but not 

 more so than the more serious and con- 

 servative statements Dr. Stiles made be- 

 fore the medical society to which he 

 presented his results. The press has, 

 however, misquoted his statements in 

 more than one particular. His results 

 briefly stated are these : 



If we go south from Virginia to the 

 gulf we meet two totally different 

 kinds of anemia, which can be dis- 

 tinguished by the soils on which they 

 occur, the parasites which cause them, 

 the symptoms which result, and the 

 treatment which is necessary. One 

 of these anemias follows the more im- 

 pervious soils such as clay and is due 

 to malaria, which, as is well known, 

 i3 caused by a minute parasite which 

 lives in the blood and which may be 

 cured by a proper use of quinine. 

 The other anemia, preeminently a 

 disease of the sandy regions, is caused 

 by a parsitic ' hookworm ' ( Uncinaria 

 americana) which lives in the intestine 

 and which is not affected by quinine 

 but can be killed by the use of thymol. 

 These two anemias have heretofore been 

 confused by most physicians, hence this 



