Eloquent figures,
that require no comment! And, despite the fact that the drug is now sold
at a merely nominal rate or freely given away to the needy - nay, thrust
down the very throats of the afflicted peasantry by devoted gentlemen
who scour the plains with ambulances during the deadly season - despite
this, the yearly profits from its sale are amounting to about
three-quarters of a million francs.
So these forlorn regions are at last beginning to revive.
And returning to Foca, of whose dreadful condition up to 1902 (year of
the introduction of Government quinine) I have just spoken, we find that
a revolution has taken place. Between that year and 1908 the birth-rate
more than doubled the death-rate. In 1908 some two hundred poor folks
frequented the ambulance, nearly six kilogrammes of quinine being
gratuitously distributed; not one of the natives of the place was
attacked by the disease; and there was a single death - an old woman of
eighty, who succumbed to senile decay. [Footnote: Doctor Genovese's
statistical investigations have brought an interesting little fact to
light. In the debilitating pre-quinine period there was a surplus of
female births; now, with increased healthfulness, those of the males
preponderate.]
This is an example of what the new quinine-policy has done for Italy, in
briefest space of time. Well may the nation be proud of the men who
conceived this genial and beneficial measure and carried it through
Parliament, and of those local doctors without whose enlightened zeal
such a triumph could not have been achieved. . . .
Sir Ronald Ross's discovery, by the way, has been fruitful not only in
practical humanitarian results. For instance, it has reduced North's
laborious "Roman Fever" to something little better than a curiosity. And
here, on these deserted shores that were once resplendent with a great
civilization - here is the place to peruse Mr. W. M. Jones's studies on
this subject. I will not give even the shortest precis of his
conscientious researches nor attempt to picture their effect upon a mind
trained in the old school of thought; suffice to say, that the author
would persuade us that malaria is implicated, to an hitherto unsuspected
extent, in the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. And he succeeds. Yes;
a man accustomed to weigh evidence will admit, I think, that he has made
out a suggestively strong case.
How puzzled we were to explain why the brilliant life of Magna Graecia
was snuffed out suddenly, like a candle, without any appreciably
efficient cause - how we listened to our preachers cackling about the
inevitable consequences of Sybaritic luxury, and to the warnings of sage
politicians concerning the dangers of mere town-patriotism as opposed to
worthier systems of confederation! How we drank it all in! And how it
warmed the cockles of our hearts to think that we were not vicious,
narrow-minded heathens, such as these!
