HEALTH AND DISEASE 33 I 



not to be inheritable (there is some dissent from this tenet) a number of 

 highly competent investigators report much evidence that degenerative 

 characteristics resulting from nutritional deficiency are inheritable in the 

 first generation. This would seem plausible since our inheritance consists 

 of a complex set of chemicals called chromosomes, which we get from 

 our parents. Though nature "guards" the germ plasm more jealously than 

 any other tissue, it is difficult to understand why chemical deficiencies in 

 the diet, if sufficiently pronounced, would not cause corresponding de- 

 ficiencies in the chromosomes and their constituent genes. 



Thus we have attempted to outhne the situation which has impelled the 

 surgeon general of the United States Public Health Service to declare that, 

 today, knowledge of nutrition opens up to medical progress a field com- 

 parable to that opened up less than three generations ago by Pasteur's dis- 

 covery of the bacterial causation of disease.^^ 



WALTER REED AND YELLOW FEVER * 



GRACE T. HALLOCK AND C. E. TURNER 



The struggle against yellow fever began more than 200 years ago. It ap- 

 proached its close when a master detective unmasked the chief villain that 

 carried the fever from one person to another. The detective was Walter 

 Reed, and he was helped by brave American soldiers who offered their 

 lives in the conquest of this disease. 



THE HISTORY OF YELLOW FEVER 



The earliest record of yellow fever says it occurred in Central America 

 in 1596. Then it was heard of in New England among the Indians, in 16 18. 

 It appeared in the Island of St. Lucia in 1664, where it killed 1,411 of a 

 population of 1,500 soldiers. In 1665, in the same place, 200 of 500 sailors 

 died of it. New York was visited by it for the first time in 1668; Boston in 

 1691, and Philadelphia in 1695. ^^ 208 years there were 95 invasions of 

 our territory by yellow fever. From 1793 on there were not less than 

 100,000 deaths from it. New Orleans, Philadelphia, Memphis, Charleston, 

 Norfolk, Galveston, New York, Baltimore, and many other cities suffered 

 a tremendous loss of life. 



In the terrible epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia, all the streets and roads 

 leading from the city were crowded with families flying to the country 

 for safety. So many doctors were sick or had died of yellow fever that "at 

 one time there were only three physicians who were able to visit patients, 



11 Parran, Nutrition and National Health, The Tech?iology Review, June, 1940. 

 • Reprinted from Health Heroes, Walter Reed by permission of the Metropolitan 

 Life Insurance Company. Copyright 1926. 



