The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14. WHAT MEDICAL SCIENCE DOES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 133, 14 September 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14. WHAT MEDICAL SCIENCE DOES.

Colonel Seeley, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, at the function inaugurating the Congress of the Journalists' Institute in London, referred to the enormous strides medical science liad made in the elimination of disease. He instanced the dread disease of sleeping sickness, which formerly decimated the population of Uganda. Men of science, with characteristic unselfishness, and who had seen isolated cases of sleeping sickness in patients brought from its home, penetrated the wilds and examined it carefully, discovered the bacillus and began the stern fight to kill it. Colonel Seely's figures are startling in their suggestiveness, for it is to be remembered that only about ten years ago the possibility of killing this and other tropical diseases seemed remote. But English, German and French medical scientists are notably painstaking, so that by combined effort the death rate from sleeping sickness has fallen in Uganda to 1700 a year, and after 200,000 had died of it. There seems to be no reason to doubt that general immunity will come later. For hundreds of years malaria took its toll of the human race, and until medical science came to the rescue and placed the blame on the mosquito i the disease decimated the people of several tropical countries. There is in Africa now no defined "White Man's Grave." In tropical America, by draining swamps and making it impossible for the mosquito that carries infection tolive, huge areas have been made habitj able and healthy. In the United States i one of the problems was "the poor white." Nobody attributed their laziness, poverty and utter lack of spirit to any other cause than sheer "cussedness," but an enquiring medical man went along and discovered the "hookworm," the tiny animal that was trying hard to depopulate a countryside. Everybody laughed at this dreaming doctor, but with the persistence of genius, he fought the hookworm and the obloquy of his fellows, and hookworm is being hit where it lives with such vigor that immunity is promised. This disease has been located by a foreign scientist in Queensland. This is one of the reasons why the colonies should welcome the sort of person who is generally looked upon as a mild lunatic until he demonstrates that he is saving thousands of lives. But medical scientists are so keen on ! the great work of killing diseases that kill people that they go further. Dr. Moore, Professor of Physiology at the University of Liverpool, is a distinguished apostle of the unification of medical services in Britain. He said:—

Such a service should be composed of the men who were at present exercising the medical profession, without any prejudice to their emoluments, but rather increasing them. In the Government were going to spend £20,000,000 a year on any incomplete service, the money would be Wasted. The Government could make the medical service of the country one that would be the admiration of the world. Such a service would wipe out one disease after another, and he staked any scientific reputation he might happen to possess that, within ten or fifteen years, they could make tuberculosis as scarce as smallpox. The Minority Report proposed that there should be a unified medical service that should apply to poor people only. He did not believe in making too many classes of poor people; too much was done in that direction already. They ought to have one system of hospitals and one form of State service.

In the one matter of tuberculosis, almost every medical scientist would also "stake his professional reputation" that it could be wiped out in a short time by unified method. The splendid promise that one disease after another could be attacked and wiped out if a whole nation was intent on such results, and the fight by the State, opens up a future of the brightest possibilities. Eliminating diseases is eliminating disabilities and killing social evils. If Professor Moore's method of unifying curative services in Britain is established, and if one disease after another is wiped out, the other nations will try to rival Britain in the fight against diseases. There is nothing so well worth the while of a nation fts the physical well-being of its units.