REDEEMING THE TROPICS 



345 



us through the patient and heroic work 

 of a group of army surgeons; we see 

 cities like Havana and Rio de Janeiro 

 transformed from pest-holes into munici- 

 palities where epidemic diseases are under 

 control. 



Today thousands, nay millions, of hu- 

 man souls living between Cancer and 

 Capricorn are being freed from the thrall- 

 dom of those terrible visitations that came 

 periodically only a few years ago. Africa 

 is rising up against the terrible sleeping 

 sickness and the insidious malaria that 

 have made it the "Dark Continent" for 

 generations without number. 



Wherever we turn we find places where 

 once a man gambled with death when he 

 visited them being converted into regions 

 where good health conditions exist. Pre- 

 ventive medicine everywhere, and in the 

 tropics in particular, is writing a new 

 geography of inhabitable territory and of 

 commercial opportunity. 



Where yesterday the barriers of dis- 

 ease were up against the peaceful and 

 resource-developing invasion of capital 

 and enterprise, there today is found 

 health and happiness and prosperity. 

 Where yesterday a man going to the 

 tropics, even for a short stay, was bid- 

 den good-bye by his friends as one who 

 stood an even chance of never returning, 

 today men and women go there for long 

 periods ; and in some places are quite as 

 safe as at home, and in hundreds of 

 others only a little less so. 



HOW IT APT HAPPENED 



Truly the story of how all this has 

 been brought about is the world's most 

 splendid exemplification of the proverb 

 that truth is stranger than fiction. For 

 hundreds of years man stood helpless and 

 appalled in the face of the onset of great 

 epidemics. He saw millions of his fel- 

 low-beings visited with deaths more hor- 

 rible than ever torture chamber could 

 invent, but not knowing whence the af- 

 fliction came or whither it went. He sur- 

 mised and guessed, and finally saw a cer- 

 tain relation between dirt and disease, 

 and gradually the elimination of dirt 

 checked the ravages of some epidemic 

 diseases. 



Then came the microscope with its dis- 

 covery of infinitesimal worlds, and with 



it Pasteur and his discovery of the rela- 

 tion between bacteria and disease. One 

 by one new germs were discovered, and 

 soon medical men came to understand 

 the methods of the transmission of most 

 of the epidemic diseases of temperate 

 climates. 



Still no one knew the cause of the 

 epidemic diseases most characteristic of 

 the tropics, and without this knowledge 

 no satisfactory superstructure of prevent- 

 ive tropical medicine could be reared. 

 Tropical humanity was attacked by myr- 

 iads of enemies so subtle that men did not 

 know even that they existed, and yet so 

 terrible that the carnage of the world's 

 battlefields paled in comparison. 



For centuries on end men had been 

 seeking after the truth of the causation 

 of yellow fever, bubonic plague, sleeping 

 sickness, and allied diseases. Some of 

 them had nearly guessed it. Sir Henry 

 Blake tells of having seen a medical work 

 in Ceylon, some 1,400 years old, which 

 charged the mosquito with being a carrier 

 of malaria. The word canopy itself was 

 brought into the language from a Greek 

 word meaning gnat. 



WHY THE CAT WAS WORSHIPED 



There were many strangely close 

 guesses at the cause of disease in the 

 early history of the human race. Far 

 back in Egyptian history the people came 

 so near to guessing the cause of plague 

 that they made the cat a sacred animal. 

 They noticed that where there were cats 

 there was no bubonic plague, and if they 

 had only stopped to think a little further 

 they might have seen that where there 

 were cats the rats were scarce. But this 

 relation did not strike them, so they went 

 on worshipping the cat, and thinking that 

 it was the animal's supernatural power 

 that saved them from contracting plague. 



The honor of having written the first 

 modern work charging the mosquito with 

 being a responsible agent in the spread 

 of yellow and malarial fevers belongs to 

 an American, Dr. Nott, of Mobile, Ala- 

 bama. In 1848 he published a treatise 

 upon yellow fever in which he charged 

 the mosquito with the crime of spread- 

 ing these diseases. A little later Dr. Louis 

 Beauperthuy, studying an epidemic of 

 yellow fever in Venezuela, also laid the 



