Notes on some early references to tropical diseases / Charles Singer.

  • Charles Singer
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Notes on some early references to tropical diseases / Charles Singer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    3/44
    [Reprinted from the ^Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, Vol. VI, No. I B, May, 1912] 87 NOTES ON SOME EARLY REFERENCES TO TROPICAL DISEASES BY CHARLES SINGER, M.A., M.D. (OxoN.), M.R.C.P. (LondJT ASSISTANT PHYSICIAN TO THE SEAMEn’s HOSPITAL (dREADNOUGHt), LONDON, REGISTRAR TO THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE, CANCER HOSPITAL, LONDON. (Received for publication 19 March, 1912) I. AN ELIZABETHAN HANDBOOK OF TROPICAL MEDICINE The kinship of letters and national enterprise has never been more happily illustrated than in the closing years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The world, grown more spacious, was daily yielding fresh material for the noble writers whose works form our inexhaustible national treasury. Within ten years around the turn of the sixteenth century there was a series of nautical adventures in close association with literary productions, showing that if the seaman exercised a moulding force on literature, literature in its turn was not without its influence on seacraft. With all this interest in oversea attempts, attention was bound to turn to the professional needs of sailors, and a large literature intended for the use of seamen rapidly arose. These works have a literary as well as a scientific value and among them books on medicine adapted to the especial needs of sailors would naturally take a place (Note i). New and strange lands yielded diseases equally new and strange, and we may therefore look to this period for the small beginnings of the special study of tropical medicine in this country. The little work which we here discuss has some pioneer claim in this regard, while it contributes an addition to the English medical works of literary merit. In 1598 there appeared in London a small pamphlet of 25 pages by one G. W., printed by F(elix) K(ingston) for H(umphrey) L(ownes). The author has entitled his work ‘ The Cures of the Diseased in Remote .Regions, Preventing Mortalitie, incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation,’ the ‘Attempts’ being