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National Geographic : 1905 Oct
Contents
THE PANAI SCOURING THE WORLD FOR LABORERS Then the coasts of Africa were scoured for able-bodied men, but even there after a short time the promises of remunera tive prices for their services ceased to draw men to the canal zone. I have seen a ship come into the port of Colon from the coast of Africa, where it had been sent under a most liberal contract on which it was expected to bring 1,500 or 2,000 men for the canal working parties, with only one or two hundred on board. It was estimated that their passage money cost the canal company in the neighborhood of $r,ooo apiece, and yet one-half of them were invalided to the hospitals almost as soon as they landed. Thus the enormous cost of the voyage was the principal result of such expeditions. PREVENTIVE SANITATION The climate was not so much the cause of this awful havoc among the laborers as the want of preventive sani tary measures. My experience, which has covered portions of five or six years in Isthmian waters, leads me to ap prove what has been reported by the U. S. minister to Panana as given in THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGA ZINE of October, 1904. It will bear re peating here. He says : " When the able sanitary corps,which has charge of bettering the health con ditions in the Isthmus has carried out its plans for the improvement of the canal strip and the cities of Panama and Colon, there is no reason why the Isthmus should not be one of the health iest places in the world. . . . There has been hardly a single instance of serious illness among the considerable number of young men employed here in work connected with the canal,while the percentage of sickness among the larger group of laborers employed at Culebra is not greater than among those engaged in similar excavating work in MA CANAL 459 the United States. Among the 400 ma rines located half way across the Isth mus, at Empire, there has not been a single death from local diseases, while the percentage of those in the hospital is not larger than would be found at the average post in the United States." THE SANITARY PRECAUTIONS TAKEN BY THE U. S. NAVY As the sanitary condition of the Isth mus is in the hands of army and navy officers, I want to make a statement concerning what I consider a reflection on these services made by a lecturer before this representative body only a few weeks ago. Lest we forget ! A distinguished medical gentleman who recently lectured here stated that neither in the curriculum of the U. S. Naval Academy nor at West Point was any attention paid to the subject of physiology or hygiene, which accounted in part for the great sacrifice of human life which took place among our forces during the Spanish-American war in 1898. While the statistics he gave are based mainly on army records, he by inference made them apply to the navy as well. As far as the U. S. Navy is concerned, his premises are wrong and his conclu sions are wrong. In the first place, there is a chair of physiology and hygiene at the Naval Academy (and one was later established at West Point), which is and has been occupied by distinguished medical officers of the navy, and the young men there undergoing instruction are given a very good general knowledge of physiology and hygiene-sufficient at all events to enable them as execu tive officers of ships to understand at least the questions which arise in the practical parts of the profession. Each ship in our navy carries one or two and sometimes three medical officers, so the sanitation of our ships is well provided for. In fact, the success that has fol lowed the navy's efforts to stamp out
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