HEALTH AND MEDICINE — GENERAL 493 



suade the native to appreciate the high standards of European 

 medicine; the former as lowering the standard to meet the current 

 native ideas. 



In addition to the native hospital, Dakar itself has a unique 

 medical centre, the Polidinique, which is run in conjunction with 

 the medical school. This serves as an out-patient centre for the 

 whole African population, but its principal object is held to be the 

 training of native auxiliary doctors, midwives, and dispensers for 

 work in the rural areas throughout the Federation. In the large 

 building with its highly developed statistical and recording organiz- 

 ation, some 380,000 consultations, representing about 63,000 cases 

 (i.e. more than a thousand consultations per day), take place 

 annually. The staff consists of five French doctors, some of whom 

 are specialists resident in Dakar who spend some hours each day 

 at the clinic, a French trained midwife and three French nurses, 

 an African auxiliary doctor and a large number of medical students, 

 including about fifty prospective doctors and twenty midwives. 

 There are separate departments for infant welfare, maternity, ear 

 and eye treatment, and a small laboratory is attached. Radiology 

 is likewise provided for, and every schoolchild in Dakar receives 

 full medical examination there twice a year. 



For sanitary work the French rely on the ordinary medical staff, 

 except at Dakar and one or two other large centres, where special 

 gendarmes see that medical orders about mosquitoes are carried out, 

 and a separate sanitary service for the destruction of rats, etc. is in 

 operation. 



In addition to the systems outlined above, there are special 

 organizations to deal with certain native diseases such as sleeping 

 sickness. These, known as equipes de prospection et traitement, num- 

 bered in 1936 ten in the northern part of the Ivory Coast, two on 

 the western border of that colony, three in Dahomey, one in Niger 

 colony, two in the Sudan, one in Senegal, and two in Guinea, 

 making a total of twenty-one, and twelve others were in formation. 

 Each equipe consists of a European doctor, accompanied by one 

 or two native auxiliary doctors and some two dozen injirmiers, of 

 which three-quarters are trained in microscopic work to identify 

 the trypanosomes or other blood parasites. The equipe is divided 

 into two parts, the first, consisting of the doctor in charge and the 



