Tropical Medicine

Now, the emergence of tropical medicine marked a transition, a transformation, from something that had preceded it, and that I hope won't be confusing. But from the middle of the eighteenth century, more or less, until the closing decade of the nineteenth century, there had been an older tradition that can be summarized under the label of "diseases of the tropics." And there were a couple of classic statements of this older tradition. One was a work, an important work, by JamesLind, an eighteenth-century physician , who wrote "An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates," and this was built on the experience of Europeans in the West Indies. And then there was another work by James Johnson called "The Influence of Tropical Climates on European constitutions ," built on the experience of Europeans in India.