CHAPTER XIV 

 HOOKWORMS 



History. — For many years it was customary in the United 

 States to look upon the shiftless people to be found in our South 

 as the product of wanton laziness and an inborn lack of ambition. 

 For decades the more fortunate Northerners considered the 

 " poor whites " of the South a good-for-nothing, irresponsible 

 people, worthy only of scorn and of the sordid poverty and ig- 

 norance which they brought upon themselves as the fruits of 

 their own shiftlessness. When it became known, largely as the 

 result of investigations by Dr. C. W. Stiles, of the U. S. Public 

 Health Service, that these hopelessly incapable and pitifully 

 emaciated and stunted people were the victims, not of their own 

 unwillingness to work or learn, but of the attacks of intestinal 

 worms which sapped their vitality, poisoned their systems, and 

 stunted both their mental and physical growth, and that over 

 two million people in our own southern states were the victims of 

 these parasites, the " poor whites " and " lazy niggers " of the 

 South became objects of pity and help rather than of scorn. 



The hookworm, which is the cause of this deplorable condition, 

 is by no means a newly discovered parasite. A close cousin of - 

 the American hookworm was discovered in Italy over 75 years 

 ago, and has subsequently been found to be prevalent in parts of 

 every warm country in the world, in some places infesting nearly 

 or quite 100 per cent of the inhabitants. It would probably be 

 well within the truth to say that over half a bilUon people in the 

 world are infected with hookworms. The disease caused by 

 hookworm, which has recently come to be used as a symbolism 

 for laziness, was known for ages before the cause of it was dis- 

 covered, in fact it was probably one of the ailments most familiar 

 to the ancient Egyptians, and descriptions of symptoms probably 

 representing hookworm disease appear in the medical papyrus 

 of 3500 years ago. The disease has gone by many names: 

 raalcoeur or mal d'estomac in the West Indies, tuntun in Colombia, 



254 



