杏吧原创

IT TAKES flair to introduce medical students to elephantiasis by showing a
slide of a 19th-century Japanese gentleman with an enormous scrotum supported in
a sling. But theatricality is Robert Desowitz鈥檚 forte, and his Tropical
Diseases: From 50 000 BC to 2500 AD (HarperCollins, 拢18.99, ISBN
0002555174) doesn鈥檛 disappoint in its telling of the story of yellow fever and
many other ills of the tropics. The combination of panache and scholarship is
extraordinary.

Yet this is a work that questions the implication in its own title: that
there is a segment of medical science unique to tropical regions. Malaria in
England, from the Middle Ages to the Kentish epidemic between 1917 and 1919, is
just one episode within a survey of astonishing breadth, taking us from the
Gondwandaland of 400 million years ago to today鈥檚 worldwide climate change.

Some readers may object to the assumption that all share the author鈥檚
nationality. 鈥淢alaria will not return to its former fearsome level,鈥� Desowitz
assures us. 鈥淲e are too rich a country ever to allow that to happen. For all
practical purposes malaria in the US is dead.鈥�

For the most part, his reflections are perceptive, his judgments sound. It is
the acute, lethal diseases, appearing suddenly, that cause panic, he observes.
Although many chronic infections are the leading causes of mortality, 鈥渄ying by
inches does not strike terror into the collective psyche鈥�.

Finally, Desowitz argues that it is as important to support researchers whose
lives are devoted to the bumblebee as it is to support those who study HIV. Well
said.