Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/260

256 the adjustment, especially if complicated by irrational habits, the body is naturally sensitive to the new diseases to which it is exposed. Even should no specific disease be contracted, there are anasmic tendencies and other degenerative changes. Experience teaches that white men can not, with impunity, do hard manual labor under a tropical sun, but that they may enjoy fairly good health as overseers, or at indoor work, if they take reasonable precautions.

Acclimatization, in the full sense of having white men and women living for successive generations in the tropics, and reproducing their kind without physical, mental and moral degeneration—i. e., colonization in the true sense—is impossible. Tropical disease and death rates, as has been abundantly shown, can, however, be greatly reduced by strict attention to sanitary laws. And with increasing medical knowledge of the nature and prevention of tropical diseases, as well as by means of modern sanitary methods, a white resident in the tropics will constantly become better able to withstand disease. For greater comfort, for better health and for greater success, properly selected hill stations will, however, always be essential to northerners who have to live in the tropics, especially to white women and children.

It has been well said that the white soldier in the tropics is "always in campaign; if not against the enemy, at least against the climate." This sentence may be made to fit the case of the white civilian in the tropics by making it read: the white race in the tropics is always in campaign against its enemy, the climate.

Health in the Temperate Zones: General.—In the temperate zones the organs of the body act more equally than in the warmer and cooler latitudes. The winter cold is met by means of warm clothing, heated houses and other means of protection. Unless too severe, or too prolonged, the cold winter acts as a healthful stimulant upon body and mind. In the tropics, the body is unused to adjusting itself to temperature changes, because such changes are there slight, and is readily affected by them. But the frequent, sudden and severe changes of many parts of the temperate zone are usually borne without serious discomfort or injury, if the body is in good health, and is accustomed to adjusting itself readily to these changes. The habit of keeping houses very warm in winter, and of having the air indoors very dry, weakens the body's power to resist the cold outdoors, especially if the air be damp, and aggravates affections of throat, lungs and nose. The summers, although hot in the lower latitudes of these zones, and marked by spells of warm weather even to their polar limits, are not characterized by such steady, uniform moist heat as is typical of much of the tropics. When the heat is extreme, and the relative humidity is high, night and day, sunstroke is occasionally noted, but the invigorating cool of autumn and winter are never far off, and may always be trusted to bring relief.