Excerpt from Human Parasitology: With Notes on Bacteriology, Mycology, Laboratory Diagnosis, Hematology
A half century ago medicine was more an art than a science. The doors of American medical .colleges stood wide open to welcome all who came as students, and if they showed a desire to learn, possessed enough elementary education to enable them to read their text-hooks and write their examination papers, no questions were asked as to their acquaintance with the physical and biologic sciences.
A few of the professors were men learned in science or letters, but the greater number knew the subjects they taught, understood "practice" or the art of their profession, and little else, looking with suspicion or distrust upon their colleagues who "wasted their time" upon the pursuit of the collateral sciences.
There was no science of parasitology. Parasites were zoologic curiosities that occasionally intruded into the sphero of medical activity. Most of the text-books informed the reader that the Tatnia solium was the common tapeworm of the United States, not because the writer knew the worm or had identified it, but because the European text-books which he used in compiling his own, so informed him. Thus he misinformed his readers. If the student learned how to kill a tapeworm, how to cause the expulsion of round worms (Ascaris lumbricoides) and seat-worms (Oxyuris vermicularis) he could well rest satisfied. Additional information might be needed by those who engaged in missionary work in the tropics, but that was a matter that concerned them alone.
Now all has changed. The necessities of commerce have led to such extensive geographic explorations that the entire surface of the earth has been explored and charted. Ethnologic investigators have uncovered the location, life and habits of many formerly unknown peoples. The demand for ivory, furs, rubber, and other commodities of wild, and especially tropical countries, has been followed by the dissemination of white men throughout the world. Improvement in transportation, increase in commerce, the - exploitation of the savage by the civilized peoples, the exigencies of war, in tropical wildernesses, carried on for the purpose of facilitating the exchange of commodities, have all greatly increased the number of medical men whose time is largely spent amid new and unusual surroundings in which they find new and strange diseases, some of which they and their patients bring back to their European or American homes.
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