Health and Civilisation.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18217, 30 October 1924, Page 8

Health and Civilisation.

The worst of Science is that we never know what faith it is going to shatter next. For a hundred and fifty years at least, and indeed at all nervy, overwrought periods right back to the dawn of history, man has believed that the cure for the ills that flesh is heir to is a return to the simple life. He loses his teeth because he eats prepared foods, contracts tuberculosis because he lives indoors, falls a victim to cancer because he has forgotten the magic of nuts and the "gospel of the " green leaf." But the mail just to hand from America robs us of this last refuge of desperation. The jungle is as full of diseases as the city, even when it is high and dry, and its inhabitants observe the latest dietary rules known to food reform. Tho N.Y. "Times" gives a long account of an investigation now in progress in the laboratories of the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, the first established result of which is the indifferent physical showing of monkeys. It has been found after a careful examination of 190 living specimens brought out of the wilds of Nicaragua that "monkeys " leading the natural life in the pure "air and the abundant sunlight of the " great open spaces of Central " America," eating nuts and fruit, and roots and green stuff, and exercising themselves daily \>y climbing and swinging and running and fighting, are just as susceptible to disease as human beings. Measured even by such standards as would apply to degenerate man, almost all of these monkeys were ill. They had ring-worm, they had iilariasis, they had swollen glands, they showed traces of toothache and pleurisy. While the head of the department of anatomy found nothing to justify " the common and fallacious belief " that civilisation is the cause of "almost every physical ill," a specialist from the Carnegie Institution was shocked to find in how many instances teeth were missing from the jaws as the result. of abscesses. "I had ex- " pected," he reported, "that I would "find a certain amount of disease, but " not that these animals would be so " far from the sound, healthful exis- " fence that people imagine all wild "things lead." It is depressing to think that the jungle can do so little for us. When we have aches and pains and organic and functional disorders it will bo no use turning our eyes to the tree-tops, because all the nuts and sun-baths of Nicaragua have not even banished ordinary toothache.