(^526) NOTES
or less unconditionally egalitarian view of geography (no one is better off than anyone
else, because no one should be), see Blaut, The Colonizer's Model.
- David Smith, "Climate, Agriculture, History: An Introduction," pp. 1-2. Further
to the point, Smith tells us that scholarship in this field demands "a willingness to ac
cept much badinage or even rejection from colleagues." - "Conditions for Economic Change in Underdeveloped Countries," Journal of
Farm Economics, 33 (November 1951), 693. Cited in Andrew Kamarack's valuable and
undeservedly neglected book, The Tropics and Economic Development, p. 4. - "How Poor Are the Poor Countries?" in Seers and Joy, eds., Development in a Di
vided World, p. 78. Cf. Rati Ram's regressions of income, life expectancy, etc., on dis
tance from the equator, "highly significant and quantitatively substantial"—"Tropics
and Economic Development," p. 10. - L. Don Lambert, "The Role of Climate," p. 339 and n. 1, compares the econo
mist's one-sided approach to that of a doctor who focused only on well people and
treated the ill by prescribing the "good life" of the well. "... the relevant questions,"
he writes, "are not only: What causes development? but also: What causes stagna
tion?" - "The Deadly Hitch-hikers," The Economist, 31 October 1992, p. 87.
- Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 186, notes a Chinese text of 1264 de
scribing schistosomiasis and other worm infestations. Cited in Jones, The European
Miracle, p. 6. - The Economist, 27 July 1991, pp. 74-75. Cf. Giblin, "Trypanosomiasis Control."
- Morbidity data from the military hospital in Bone—Curtin, Death by Migration,
pp. 65-66. - These data from World Bank, World DevelopmentReport iP94, Table l,pp. 162-63.
- World Bank, World Development Report 1991, Table 28, pp. 258-59, and 1994,
Table 27, pp. 214-15. Richard Easterlin calls these gains a "mortality revolution"—
one that is still under way. - The price remains high in spite of modern laboratory techniques and security pre
cautions. On the battle against deadly, newly discovered viruses, most of them of trop
ical origin, see Altman, "Researcher's Infection." - Sattaur, "WHO to Speed Up Work on Drugs for Tropical Diseases," p. 17. Once
again, some would disagree. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model, pp. 77-78, contends that
until very recently, "midlatitude" climes (he prefers to avoid the word "temperate")
have been just as disease-ridden as tropical; and that inhabitants of the tropics develop
appropriate immunities to pathogens and parasites. Other things equal, "is there, then,
a remainder that can be called 'the innate [intrinsic?] unhealthiness of the tropics'?
Probably the answer is no." - N.T. Times, 16 February 1997, p. 1.
- On the conflict between the Western, scientific school and indigenous medicine,
see Verma, "Western Medicine," who feels that the Europeans have kept their own se
crets. The Westerners came with methods and printed books; the native practitioners
had no books, only practice and secrets. The Westerners wanted help, especially for
such mass procedures as vaccination. But they taught the natives less than they taught
their own countrymen, for equal education would have undermined authority (p.
134). - Cf. Gwyn Prins, who tells us, "Hygasa was for many Africans seen as the colonial
ist's whore"—"But What Was the Disease?", p. 164. This is an unhappy article, alert
to the failings and wrongs of colonial medicine, sympathetic to traditional therapies
without being credulous, almost angry. The author is torn between science and a dif
ferent kind of "knowledge": "why should those explanations which are found to be
widely applicable be assumed to be universally pre-eminent" (p. 178)? But are Africans
biologically different?