The early British and American journals of tropical medicine and hygiene: an informal survey.

An old proverb tells us that "the ink of science is more precious than the blood of martyrs". Some might argue that point, but no one would deny that we have spilled vast quantities of ink into the vessels we call journals, including those concerned with tropical diseases. But before turning to those journals, we might well ask: What are the tropical diseases? No one is quite sure how to define tropical diseases. James Lind, of scurvy fame, told of the awful toll exacted of seamen in the eighteenth century by "the maladies of the intemperate climates", that is, the tropics. Scott's history of tropical medicine comments that the "diseases met with in warm climates . .. include nearly all the flesh is heir to, except, perhaps, frostbite", and maybe that, too.1 Neither Lind nor Scott defined tropical diseases any more closely, nor, for that matter, did Patrick Manson, now considered the Father of Tropical Medicine, in his 1898 text Tropical diseases, an apparently immortal book now in its nineteenth edition.2 Manson said that the truly tropical diseases were few and the others one encountered encompassed nearly all of medicine, and he therefore included in his definition those diseases "specially