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More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces.
Endurance through generations has given the people large immunity from the effects of hook-worm and malaria, but not from the indigenous diseases, kraw-kraw, yaws and elephantiasis, nor of course from dysentery and smallpox which the Europeans introduced. Yet robust health is fairly common, and where health prevails there is generally happiness, for the negroes have that within their nature.
Soon after this the investigations of a military surgeon demonstrated the important fact that ninety per cent of the working population of the island were affected with the hook-worm disease. Apart from other diseases which were present, here was a great economic and humanitarian problem.
He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light, and muttered his way morosely into bed. "What?" said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling. "More like hook-worm, I said," he explained, speaking louder. "I don't know what to do with him!"
He was afflicted with slow consumption or thought he was, which was just as effective, and in addition had hook-worm, though that parasitic producer of hopeless tiredness was not yet discovered and named.
Crump became confidential. "This is a queer business," he said. "Old Ben is chewing pieces out of the furniture up there. He's mad clean through. He's losing money all the while the people are making up their minds about this thing, and it beats him why they're so slow." "It beats me, too. I don't believe these hook-worm victims ever turned my father out.
Scientific investigations conducted with the aim of discovering the causes for this general inefficiency have led to the conclusion that the eradication of the mosquito and hook-worm will add greatly to the ability of the wage-earners. A systematic campaign in this direction has been made possible through the recent gift of Mr. Rockefeller.
The hook-worm which affects so many persons in the South is often called "the lazy disease" since the persons afflicted with it are not totally disabled, but are lacking in energy and vigor because the small insects take from the blood the red corpuscles which should carry the digested food all over the body.
Besides the more common ailments, with which all are familiar, there are many cases of hook-worm anemia and a number of other diseases peculiar to the tropics. Then there are many who need surgical treatment. Blind men come in led by little boys; some are brought in rocking chairs by their friends; others are carried in hammocks, while still others arrive in coaches or automobiles.