THE HAPPY ISLANDERS
Snt,—I suppose you uphold Dr. Johnson about the conglobulation of the swallows. For he was just as accurate about that as he was about the St. Kilda cold. That was a scientific fact, and was due to the purity of the air. The people did not have colds, and when strangers came, who
carried latent cold germs. in their breath, the St. Kildaits developed the violent colds of the unimuwnised. Exactly the same phenomenon is described by Dr. Lambert of the Rockefeller Survey, in his book A Doctor in Paradise, as happening on Rennell Island in 1930. He and some other Europeans were the first to visit this island. He examined the ship's company meticulously before going ashore, especially for colds. They were quite free ; but within ten days the whole island population was suffering from violent colds. They had not the slightest idea what was wrong with them ; they, did not even know how to blow their noses. The foreigners had infected them with cold germs latent in their systems. A minor example of the same thing is the violent colds to which even town-dwellers succumb, to their fury, after a summer holiday in pure air.—Yours, &c., FREDA WHITE. Flat 25, 70 Chancery Lane, E.C. 4.
[Janus writes: "Miss White gives no authority for her dogmatic statement about St. Kilda. The explanation offered to Boswell, that ' the situation of St. Kilda renders a North-East Wind indispensably necessary before a stranger can land ; the wind, not the stranger, occasions an epidemick cold' is not on the face of it unreasonable."]
Previous page
