﻿THE PHILIPPINE 



Journal of Science 



B. Tropical Medicine 



Vol. IX JUNE, 1914 No. 3 



SOME DATA CONCERNING THE MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY OF 



THE PHILIPPINES^ 



By Fernando Calderon 



(From the College of Medicine and Surgery, University of the Philippines, 

 and the Philippine General Hospital) 



The literature on the medical geography of the Philippines 

 is very scant, and any investigator who would search in the 

 archives and libraries for treatises concerning the demography 

 of the different regions of the Archipelago would perhaps find 

 an article here and there about a tropical affection and its 

 predominance in certain localities or an essay about the diseases 

 most frequently observed in certain regions of the Philippines, but 

 never would he find any work which deals with the demography 

 and sanitary condition of the Archipelago as a whole nor would 

 he find any article on the geographic distribution of the diseases 

 that afflict the people of the Philippines in the different regions 

 of the Archipelago. The only work that pretends to approach 

 the medical geography of the Philippines was written by Antonio 

 Codorniu,^ a member of the Spanish Medical Corps in these 

 Islands, and this work is at the most not more than a tentative 

 one on the "description of the Philippine conditions which have 

 an influence over the human body under the special circumstances 

 of individuality with respect to the inhabitants of the Islands." 

 His more or less authentic observations, however, are worth 

 repeating here. He says that — 



1. The northern provinces are more healthful than those situated south 

 of Manila, and the Visayan Islands, in spite of their being in a low latitude, 

 are the most healthful place of all. 



* Read before the Congress of Filipino Physicians, held in Manila, 

 February, 1914. 



'Medical Topography of the Philippine Islands. Madrid (1857). 

 126334 199 



