SANITARY CONDITIONS IN THE BAHAMA 



ISLANDS 



BY 



CLEMENT A. PENROSE, M. D. 



INTRODUCTION. 



A thorough consideration of an}' country from a medical point of view 

 would fill volumes. In these chapters, devoted to the medical conditions in 

 the Bahama Islands, we can only hope to discuss in a general way the many 

 interesting problems encountered on the Expedition, and leave until later, and 

 to other means of publication, a technical study of the more important diseases. 



The Bahama Islands offer so many rare opportunities for medical research 

 that it was chiefly for this reason the author was persuaded to interrupt the 

 even tenor of a general practice and take a trip of several thousand miles in 

 a two-masted schooner of one hundred tons burden. 



Situated as these beautiful little Islands are, well out in the Atlantic 

 Ocean, often widely separated from each other, and even more isolated by the 

 character of their shoals, which the wary mariner is only too anxious to avoid, 

 they represent little units in which most interesting problems can be separately 

 studied and which collectively constitute a study of the archipelago. As differ- 

 ent islands are frequently inhabited by descendants of different races of people, 

 such as Spanish, English, Americans, and Negroes, the old aboriginal stock 

 having been completely exterminated years ago, one can study racial peculiar- 

 ities under similar tropical conditions, and under varying conditions of civil- 

 ization. In certain of the islands are found only white people who have 

 entirely excluded the negro; in others, only negroes who have almost entirely 

 excluded the whites; and between these two extremes are islands in which every 

 mixture of white and black blood can be noted. This affords a rare opportun- 

 ity for studying from a racial point of view the immunity of the blacks, whites 

 and mulattoes to the prevalent conditions, and of contrasting the one with the 

 other. 



