17,1 Banister: Military and Civilian Surgeons 17 
big business center to provide the large base hospitals therein 
with everything they needed. 
Since the military surgeon and the civilian practitioner worked 
together with such brilliant results during the World War, and 
with ever-increasing mutual esteem and admiration and under- 
standing, would it not be a pity for them to fall apart in time of 
peace and lose touch, and no longer regard each other as com- 
rades as they learned to do during the World War? It is with 
the idea of preserving the entente cordiale that I said in the 
beginning of this lecture that I was gratified when the military 
surgeons were invited to participate in this meeting of the 
Philippine Islands Medical Association. 
When the civilian practitioner of the Tropics exterminates 
tropical diseases such as cholera, malarial fever, tropical dysen- 
tery, and others, then man can again return unto his birthright. 
I hold it is a self-evident fact that the Tropics is the natural 
habitat of man. Before man invented fire and clothes, he could 
have lived nowhere else but in the Tropics. After these inven- 
tions he migrated to other zones, probably driven by tropical 
diseases which he could not control, to climate conditions where 
they did not prevail. The military surgeons have shown in 
Panama and Havana that the Tropics can be made as healthy 
as any other part of the world. It should be the aspiration of 
the medical profession of these Islands to make them as healthy 
as any other country. It is possible, because it has been done 
in other tropical places, and what man has done, man may do. 
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