Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/842

822, as with gonorrhœa and some other complaints, furnish the worst victims. As regards its treatment, quinine has far less efficacy with them than with us, and arsenic is more of a specific remedy to them, though this depends on the actual variety of the fever. With the negro, after-effects upon the constitution are quite exceptional.

—Special liability and increased mortality belong to the light-haired Europeans, and acclimatization is by no means absolute; yet pure-blooded negroes possess congenital immunity, which is certainly absent from Redskins, or Hindoo coolies, though the Chinese are almost exempt.

—The African races incur the greatest danger from this dread disease, dying off without an effort at resistance and with the greatest rapidity, giving little opportunity for treatment. Europeans and Hindoos, however, provided the latter are under fair hygienic conditions as to food, etc., suffer very similarly. After a famine the Indians, deprived of all resisting power, fall ready victims.

gives a typical instance of acclimatization of race through heredity, for in tropical regions the disease is often completely limited to strangers. During my visit to Jinjeera, off the Malabar coast, I was informed that the foul water of the large "tank" is certain death to a European through this fever, and yet it forms the ordinary drinking-water supply of the crowded inhabitants. Among such people mild cases, due probably to the same poison exerting a much mitigated action, are, however, not infrequent. In this instance time has apparently produced a modified form of the disease by a general protective process of natural infection, similar in its effects to inoculation, as well as by the allpervading action of natural selection and accommodation to environment.

is well known specially to select tropical races, and to run a more rapid course with them.

punishes negroes of the coast of Africa often and very viciously. Phagedæna forms an ordinary complication, as also does bone-disease; and specific treatment has to be pushed with perseverance. On the other hand, the central Africans are remarkably exempt, as are also Icelanders and Greenlanders. In Chinese ports Europeans suffer extremely when compared with the natives, as if the poison, like other living species, had its varieties. Perhaps, too, an inherited natural inoculation becomes a protection to particular races.

for some reason, it may be carelessness as to clothing and dwelling, inflicts greater punishment on indigenous dark races than on strangers among them, runs a much more trying course, and is more resistant to therapeutic influence.