Shorter Notices
Congo Doctor. By W. E. Davis, M.D. (Robert Hale. I2S. 6d.) IN spite of punctures to his bicycle, swamps, ants, cockroaches, damp, smoke-filled huts, the lack of a bath (he punctured his in killing a rat), the halitosis and body odour of his patients and their belief in magic, Dr. Davis liked the Congo better than Kentucky. He liked the moon and the smell of honeysuckle, the dark contented rivers, the velvet-skinned Bantu. He describes the difficulties better than the delights, but he would like to be there now. His medicine, he admits, became less scientific; neosalvarsan cures yaws dramatically, so the natives wanted " the needle " for every complaint or occasion. He gave it them. But he treated 50,000 patients a year on £200 and his operation mortality was as low as 1 per cent., even with all the relations in the theatre. In these circumstances it is a pity there is not more medicine in the book. The more so when he makes such suggestive statements. The natives ate hot, highly peppered food, but never got cancer of the stomach or any other carcinomata; there was no typhus, typhoid, cholera, plague. Their teeth were unusually bad; childbirth not easy; tuberculosis spreading fast, the gonococcus universal. And he describes their reaction to modern times, to Christianity, to marriage (ruined by relatives), and to education (they don't like theory), without mentioning the ten million Americans who came from around those parts.
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