War against Tropical Disease: Being Seven Sanitary Sermons addressed to all interested in Tropical Hygiene and Administration

Abstract

AN essential in medical treatment is that the patient shall have faith in the professed healer; his rulings must be accepted as well as his drugs. Hence, in a period when empirical observations were the necessary substitute for scientific investigation, occasionally it might not have been conducive to the bodily safety of the physician were the patient to doubt the soundness of the deductions therefrom. Argument was therefore successfully evaded by an assumption of mystery too deep for ordinary mortals to fathom; drug roots were gathered with incantations by moonlight—the fever-stricken patient submitted to being deprived of a breath of fresh air. With the physician of the present day, so far as drugs are concerned, the awe inspired by mysticism to some extent remains; professional ethics—to the advantage of the patient—ordain secrecy, but the crude rulings of the past have been superseded by the dicta of the science of hygiene, which insist that “prevention is better than cure.” Its devotees demand, not professional mysticism, but world-wide propaganda. Nowhere, in the interests of life, is this more necessary than in those portions of the world vaguely termed the “tropics,” where even useful, though ancient, empirical sanitary deductions have been forgotten, or have become inapplicable in the press of life accompanying modern civilisation.

War against Tropical Disease: Being Seven Sanitary Sermons addressed to all interested in Tropical Hygiene and Administration

By Dr. Andrew Balfour. Pp. 219. (London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox, 1920.) Price 12s. 6d. net.