INTRODUCTION

    IT should be clearly understood that a doctor is one so saturated with people's illnesses and ailments that, if thoughtful, he is almost forced to look upon life as something heavily burdened by these defects.

    I shall myself carry with me the profound impression of the first months I spent in the hospital wards and out-patient departments many years ago. I had come from the vigorous and exuberant life of an English public school, where everything that really absorbed one's boyish interests was based on a glowing vitality and responsive health. After the penance of school hours there was plenty of time to let the muscles go--games, sports, ragging, bathing, or running and walking over untilled fields. All these things were of sunlight and wind or the raw cold, which made the blood snap round its course.

    Something of this life accompanies the early years of the medical student, but there is always about one the lure of the hospital work to draw one to its consuming interests. One is caught in the meshes of the problems of disease, from which one will not be able to free the mind for the rest of one's life.

    For impressions of youth are those that remain. They colour all one's thought and experience, they largely select that thought and experience. And the impression of the quantity of diseases and the suffering due to them is a tremendous one. I used sometimes to walk about London with my eyes down and with the question "Why?" upon my lips until I saw pictures ofthe many maleficent objects of pathology upon the pavements, so vivid was the impression which the microscope and the post-mortem room made upon me.

    The effect was not one of depression; that is not the effect upon healthy youth. It was one which stimulated one like a stouter opponent than oneself at boxing. Here was truly a prodigious opponent, the problem of disease, why man is so affected.

    After debating the question--Why disease? Why not health?--again and again with my fellow students, I slowly, before I qualified, came to a further question--Why was it that as students we were always presented with sick or convalescent people for our teaching and never with the ultrahealthy? Why were we only taught disease? Why was it presumed that we knew all about health in its fulness? The teaching was wholly one-sided. Moreover, the basis of our teaching upon disease was pathology, namely, the appearance of that which is dead from disease.

    We started from our knowledge of the dead, from which we interpreted the manifestations, slight or severe, of threatened death, which is disease. Through these various manifestations, which fattened our text-books, we approached health. By the time, however, we reached real health, like that of the keen times of public school, the studies were dropped. Their human representatives, the patients, were now well, and neither we nor our educators were any longer concerned with them. We made no studies of the healthy--only the sick.

    Disease was the reason for our specialized existences. There was also a great abundance of it. Between its abundance and its need to ourselves its inevitability was taken for granted. Gradually, however, a question forced itself upon me more and more insistently. Had not some of this "inevitability" attached to disease come about by our profession only viewing disease from within? What would happen if we reversed the process and started by learning all we could about the healthiest people and animals whom we could discover? This question pursued me with considerable constancy, but unfortunately I was not provided with that will which is a part of what I reverence so much--the genius of discovery. Those who possess it grip an idea and never let it go. They are as passionate for it to get on in the world as the mother is for her offspring; daring, as even weak animals do, to challenge hopeless odds on its behalf. After achieving a small local repute in research, all I did was to apply for scholarships, and in my applications I placed a subject of my own choice, to study the health of the healthiest people I could discover.

    I did not, of course, succeed. My proposal was probably looked upon as ridiculous. To research in health was a complete reversal of the accustomed outlook, which was confined by the nature of the profession to different aspects of disease. For to the profession disease is the base and substance of its structure and health just the top of the pyramid, where it itself comes to an end. To propose reversing this was like asking one to stand on one's head to get the right point of view.

    At any rate my applications came to nothing, though I was offered work upon the accepted lines. In this I had not the necessary faith, so I gave up research and went into practice. I remained interested in very healthy people and read what I could about them, but the work imposed by the war and by practice in the following years withheld me from anything more than an academic interest in the old question--Health; why not?

    It was not until two years ago, when I had more leisure, that a vivid sentence in the writings of Sir Robert McCarrison thawed my frozen hope. The sentence was: "These people are unsurpassed by any Indian race in perfection of physique; they are long lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general." Further study of his writings was very encouraging. Here was a research worker who researched in health and healthy people; in fact, he presented to himself health as a problem, and produced answers to it, in some such words as the following: "Here is a people of unsurpassed health and physique, and here are researches into the reasons thereof."

    In this way it will be seen we come as researchers straight to health without intervention, and to health in the full dictionary sense of the word of wholeness, namely, sound physique of every organ of the body without exceptions and freedom from disease. This is the knowledge which we all want to know. We want to know what is full health, whether the tremendous part illness and ailments play in modern civilized countries is really necessary and, if not, upon what primarily does health depend. We can ourselves attain to health--or at least with our modern skill in investigation we should be able to do so--if this full health exists in any part of our Empire to-day. Ate shall at least learn more about how to be healthy ourselves and how to bring healthy children into the world by studying successful human examples than we can by any other way.

    By studying the wings of birds in flight we have made our machines carry us through the air. By studying one of the healthiest peoples of the world we might so improve our methods of health as to become a really healthy people ourselves. A research in health is really promising. Well, here is one. Let us see if the promise is fulfilled.



Chapter I
THE HUNZA PEOPLE

    WHERE India meets Afghanistan and the Chinese Empire and is closest to the Soviet Republics, there, amidst a congress of great mountains, is the Native State of Hunza.

    If one looks at a map of this part of the world with the mountain ranges shown by strongly-marked lines, they are seen to sweep towards each other to meet to the north of, at and to the south of the cleft of the Hunza valley.

    A map in Mrs. Visser-Hoofts' Among the Kara-Korum Glaciers (1926) is of this kind. To the north is the mighty wall of the Tien-shan, coming from Mongolia, as the northern border of the Chinese Turkestan, to merge itself with the Pamir in the west, to the north of Hunza. South of the Tien-shan, forming the southern boundary of Turkestan and separating it from Tibet, is the curved line of the Kwen-lun, passing from east to west also to meet the line of the Pamir.

    Yet further south, passing from west to east, is the straight line of the Hindu-Kush. From the east, passing west and meeting the Hindu-Kush at the cleft of Hunza, is the Kara-Korum range. Sweeping up from the south-east is the main Himalaya, ending in the lesser ranges of Chitral and Afghanistan to the south of Hunza.

    In the congress of these huge ranges is to be found the greatest folding of the earth's surface, and where the folding is actually greatest, that is between the Hindu-Kush to the west and the Kara-Korum to the east, there, in a profound cleft, between walls of ten to fifteen thousand feet in height, lies the habitable part of Hunza.

    Could any place be less like England, or London, which now harbours a quarter of England's population? Is any place less likely to give us guidance in matters of health than this cleft between its prodigious unscaled mountain walls?

    That seems a reasonable enough doubt. Certainly there are stupendous superficial differences. Yet, the beautiful and highly cultivated sunny seven miles, which is the heart of Hunza, may, by its very remoteness, have sheltered primary truths of health which our civilisation forgotten.

    Fortunately many people have seen the Hunza folk, for their valley is the highway to the 15,600 feet wall which divides India from China and is called the Mintaka Pass. The pass is itself only some ten miles from the extreme eastern corner of Afghanistan. Moreover, a good walker, starting early in the day, can pass over it and reach Kizil Robat, which is the most south-eastern post of Bolshevist Asia. So a lot of people have passed along this cleft, and no doubt in the past a lot more, in big invading troops, would like to have done so. Actually, more than a thousand years ago an army of ten thousand Chinese did cross the Darkot Pass (15,400 feet) into the neighbouring valley of Yasin and occupied the Gilgit district, but that proved to be an inimitable feat. With this exception, these clefts have only been traversed by small groups of men. In modern times most of the European explorers, missionaries, and officials, on their way from India to Central Asia, take the Hunza route.

    Europeans do not live in Hunza. In transit they spend a few days in Baltit, the capital of Stanza, collecting coolies for their further journey and enjoying the hospitality of its famous ruler, Mir Mohammed Nazim Khan. So there is no account of Hunza by a resident. Nevertheless, many travellers have left their impressions of Hunza, and the officials of the Gilgit Agency to which Hunza is now attached have to visit the valley on their official rounds. Hence a good deal is known about the Hunza people, but superficially rather than intimately. They are still a people peculiarly themselves. They have preserved their remoteness from the ways and habits of the modern world, and with it those methods of life which contribute or cause the excellent physique and bodily health which is theirs.

    The travellers and officials with one voice bear testimony to the Hunzas' physique. They find these people not only fearless, good-tempered and cheerful, but also as possessing a marvellous agility and endurance.

    For example, that illustrious traveller and savant, Sir Aurel Stein, when on the way to the "Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan" (1903), was amazed on the morning of June 25th to see a returning messenger who had been sent by the Mir to the political Munshi of Tashkurghan to prepare him for Stein's impending arrival. The messenger had started on the 18th. It was just seven complete days between his start and his return, and in that time he had travelled two hundred and eighty miles on foot, speeding along a track mostly two to four feet wide, sometimes only supported on stakes let into the cliffwall, and twice crossing the Mintaka Pass, which is the height of Mont Blanc. The messenger was quite fresh and undisturbed, and did not consider that what he had done was unusual.

    Nor was it, not even its speed. To pass along mountain tracks, of course, is the only way the people can get out of their strip of green country between river and mountain. But that does not make their going up and down and across the faces of precipices easy-going. Yet "it is quite a usual thing for a Hunza man to walk the sixty miles to Gilgit at one stretch, do his business and return direct," says Colonel R. C. F. Schomberg, who for eight years had occasion to visit the Gilgit Agency and saw much of the Hunza.

    They are a peculiar people, almost like the mountain ibex which they hunt, in the ease of their gait. When they traverse these huge distances they have such a quick, light way of passing over the ground that they can be detected at great distances from other peoples on a mountain track. "How can you tell at such a distance that those laden coolies are Hunza?" asked Schomberg of his native companions. "By the way they walk," was the reply.

    Indeed, interpolated in the fascinating narrative of Schomberg's travels Between the Oxus and the Indus (1905) one finds a constant paean of the physique and excellence of the Hunza. This is the more interesting, for Schomberg visited a number of other populated valleys of the Gilgit Agency, and, though mountainous conditions and climate were the same, the people did not compare, on the whole, in physique and quality with the Hunza.

    Some of the peoples, however, Schomberg found, approached but did not reach the Hunza. He set out from Gilgit and passed through the fief of Punyal. "The Punyalis," he writes, "are splendid climbers," and then comes a little bit of the paean, "second only to the men of Hunza."

    Punyal is the first bit of country to the west, going from Gilgit, up the valley of the Gilgit river, with the mountains of Hunza on the right. Some sixty miles further westwards is Chizr, on the borders of Chitral. The people of Ghizr are lazy. They do not store food carefully for the winter, and at the end of the winter are usually starving. Schomberg's two Hunza attendants mocked at the hovels in which the men of Ghizr lived. The owners of the hovels replied meekly that they knew their houses were squalid and miserable, but they could not be troubled to build new ones. The general assent with which the bystanders received this explanation showed how ingrained this laziness of character was in the Ghizr people. Now, the Hunza are a most industrious people. And yet Hunza and Ghizri are not far apart, and both live within similar surroundings.

    Two valleys, like the Hunza in being made by rivers flowing from the Kara-Korum glaciers south to the Gilgit river, lie to the west of Hunza. The first is Ishkoman, the second Yasin. Schomberg visited both. The Yasinis had fine lands and ample crops, and were, moreover, of fine physique, though falling short of the folk of Hunza and Punyal. Yet the Ishkomanis, whose valley is between that of the Yasinis and that of the Hunza, though living under apparently like conditions to their neighbours, were poor, undersized, undernourished creatures. There was plenty of land and water, but the Ishkomanis were too indolent to cultivate it with thoroughness, and the possibility of bad harvests was not enough to overcome their sloth. They had a number of yaks, but they were too lazy to load them or to ride them or to collect their valuable hair or even to milk them. They had no masons or carpenters or craftsmen in their country.

    Many of them showed signs of disease. "The more I saw of the Ishkomanis, the more I was struck by their degeneracy; they were poor in physique and lacking in brains; a strange type of mountaineer!" (Schomberg). Why they were so poor a type with such fine people on the other side of the eastern wall of their valley their visitor does not say. But it is so. These poor Ishkomanis, who danced to entertain their guests, looked like "newly-hatched chickens," as a Hunza spectator scornfully remarked, whereas the Hunza dance is altogether wonderful, according to travellers.

    The difference of the Ishkomanis and the Hunza cannot be due to their being on different sides of their twenty-thousand feet wall. In this relation the two peoples are not north and south, but west and east. Both valleys run to the south from the main range, so the similarity of their situation remains.

    From the valley where "the people represent as low a type of humanity as any in north-west India" Schomberg passed from the south into the valley of the Hunza river. On the way he had to pass through the territory of one more people, the Nagiris of the Native State of Nagir, situated on the southern side of the Hunza river valley, but with a capital a little removed in a branch valley joining the main valley from the east.

    The Nagiris, though facing the people of Hunza, are not of their physical class. By all travellers who write of them this is noted. They are of good physique in the main, but they fail to reach the supreme excellence and energy of the Hunza, which makes so light of the stern conditions in which both live.

    It is recorded that in all the little wars that arose between these neighbours, the Hunza, though less numerous, have invariably won. Even in games it is the same. Bruce, in 1894, organised various sports and games between Hunza and Nagiris. The Hunza men won every event. As coolies for mountaineering expeditions the Hunza have greatly the superior reputation. They are superb mountaineers and unequalled slab climbers, whereas the Nagiris have no such superlative repute. Nor have the Nagiris the brightness and good humourof the Hunza; they are more sedate and morose. The Nagiris give as a reason for this difference that in winter, when the sun is in the south, they on the south side of the valley are in the shadow of the great mountains, whereas the Hunza on the northern side enjoy the sun. It is true that, owing to a western bend to the river, the Hunza do get more sun, but this extra sun would not cover the Hunza superiority to the men of Ghizr and many others who also live on the northern side of their west to east valleys. Still, this is a difference which we, in a British winter, can appreciate.

    The Nagiris are slovenly and have unclean habits, because of which, say the Hunza, they also have such swarms of flies. They are content with squalid houses and with indolent workmanship. "The people of Nagir," writes Schomberg, "are poor husbandmen, believing rather in the kindness of Providence than in hard work, and their lovely fertile country owes but little to its owners."

    Passing Nagir, Hunza is reached. It is in the main a stretch of intense cultivation, extending some seven to eight miles along the northern bank of the Hunza river. It is a place of brilliant beauty. Facing it to the south is the great white cloud of Rakaposhi, 25,550 feet high, rising some 18,000 feet above the valley itself and dominating it, though on a vaster scale, as Mont Blanc dominates the valley of Chamonix. Between the valley and the snows are huge barren precipices, except where the slopes allow of terraced vegetation. These terraces in summer are bands of brilliant green or golden corn from the river bank almost up to the verge of the snows. In the autumn the green of the abundant fruit trees change to scarlet and gold and vermilion and even bright pink, so that Mr. Skrine in Chinese Central Asia (1926), on his way through Hunza, wonders that no artist has made his name "world-famous" by transferring to his canvas something of the incomparablc brilliancy of the multi-coloured valley, with its tremendous frame of grim, rocky malls, above which are the immeasurable snows.

    Here dwell the Hunza, whose numbers Major Biddulph in Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (1880) roughly calculated as 6,ooo people, but who have, since the census was instituted about 1911, it seems increased, to their detriment, to 14,000.

    Their occupation has been and is agricultural, but to this they added, before coming under the British suzerainty, a little banditry. They were not cruel; indeed, they seem to have regarded the looting of fat Turkis on their way to Mecca or the Khergiz of the Pamirs in part as a sport. But it was a sport that often ended in failure and a long journey home without food.

    As brigands they showed their wonderful powers of endurance, travelling for miles along cruel precipices and crossing turbulent rivers at a speed none other could accomplish. They were, of course, much feared, and in 1891 Colonel Durand led an expedition to stop their practices. It seems that they were not unwilling to stop. Durand The Making of a Frontier (1894), discovered that they did not care to neglect their fields for banditry. Agriculture was their real desire, and true agriculturists are not military. "As brigands," says Durand, "they appear to have acted always on the orders of their chief, and the admirable culture of their ground, the immense and persistent labour spent on their irrigation channels, and on the retaining walls of their terraced fields," showed him clearly where their interests as a people lay.

    Since brigandage has had to be abandoned as an extra source of income by the chiefs, its place has been taken by the profit received from the hire of porterage by travellers and mountaineers. The Hunza are quite exceptional porters. All mountaineers are agreed on this point. Two quotations from Volume 71 (1928) of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society are examples of the general testimony.

    General Bruce, of Mount Everest fame, recounted in 1928 at the Royal Geographical Society, how, in 1894, he had to call up the one-time Hunza Rifles; how they left their flocks away up in the mountains, collected their kit, and "went to Gilgit in one march of sixty-five miles of very bad country indeed. . . . I found the Hunza people most charming and perfectly companionable. They are as active as any people can possibly be . . . and as slab climbers nobody in the world can beat the Hunza men. For hard work in the mountains, if we had a trained body, they would not prove inferior to our best Sherpa porters," who have so nobly assisted our Everest climbers almost to the top of the world, but not quite.

    The second testimony is that of Captain C. Y. Morris, who explored the Hunza side valleys and glaciers in 1927. "These men were with us for just on two months," he said at the same meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1928. "During this time they were continuously on the move and over what is probably some of the worst country in the world for laden men. Always ready to turn their hand to anything, they were, I think, the most cheerful and willing set of men with whom I have ever travelled. . . . At the worse part of all we halted in order to help the porters across. They disdained our proffered assistance, however, and came over, climbing like cats, and with never a murmur at the hardships of this day's work."

    If there is anything to try the nerves in these parts and give the equivalent of neurasthenia, it must be the danger and the exhausting work of porterage. Other porters give up, as the readers of the tales of recent expeditions, such as that which conquered Nanda Devi, know. Not so the Hunza. They know neither the fear nor the weariness which spoils the will.

    Far from being nervous or morose, nearly every visitor testifies to their freedom from quarrels and exceptional cheerfulness. This cheerfulness, one notes, seems to be a characteristic of the little Tibetans of Baltistan, Tibetans, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, all of whom, we shall see, follow certain similar principles of agriculture.

    The Hunza originally were brought into contact with the British power owing to their interference with trade, which was by the same British converted from a hindrance to an assistance. But no people, of course, can exist upon banditry or porterage. "Far from being mere robber tribes," wrote Biddulph in 1880, of the Hunza, "they are settled agricultural communities."

    Here also, as might be expected, they excel. They are admirable cultivators, far famed as such and "conspicuously ahead of all their neighbours in brain and sinew," stated Schomberg. Their big irrigation conduit, the Berber, is "famous everywhere in Central Asia."

    They are also what really follows from being capable agriculturists, namely, good craftsmen. Amongst the peoples of the Agency not only are they "as tillers of the soil quite in a class apart," writes Schomberg, "they alone--and this always strikes me as truly remarkable--are good craftsmen. As carpenters and masons, as gunsmiths, ironworkers, or even as goldsmiths, as engineers for roads, bridges or canals, the Hunza men are outstanding."

    Lastly, as Mr. C. P. Skrine notes in Chinese Central Asia (1926), as dancers "they are incomparably finer than the well-known Cuttack dancing of the North-west Frontier."

    As to food, owing to their excellent agriculture they have enough to eat, except the few weeks preceding the summer harvest. They have wheaten bread, barley and millet, a variety of vegetables and fruits. They have milk, buttermilk, clarified butter, and curd-cheese. They have occasional meat. They rarely have any fish or game. They take wine, mostly about the time of Christmas. They used to make spirits, but that has been forbidden.

    It is important to note, as has been already stated, that since the suzerainty of the British the population has, it seems, increased, a common phenomenon when such a people comes in contact with the west. There is, therefore, less food for them than in the past, and Colonel D. L. Lorimer, who was Political Agent at Gilgit 1920-4, and revisited the Hunza and lived amongst them at Aliabad, 1933-4, four miles from the capital, Baltit, told me that not only did they-seem smaller to him at his second visit, but that the children appeared undernourished for the weeks preceding the first summer harvests half way through June; and, moreover, that the children suffered at that time of year from impetigo, or sores of the skin, all of which vanished when the more abundant food came. The supply of land and water is not to-day sufficient for the people at the pre-harvest period, the climate of Hunza being arid.

    The most conspicuous feature of the Hunza diet is the large quantity of fruit they eat, fresh in the summer and at other times dried, either alone or in wheatencakes. There is so much fruit in Hunza that "even the animals," said Durand, "take the fruit diet, and you see donkeys, cows and goats eating the fallen mulberries. The very dogs feed on them, and our foxterriers took to the fruit regimen most kindly and became quite connoisseurs."

    The daily eating is given by Schomberg as: nothing before going out in the early morning to the fields; after two or threee hours of work, bread, pulses and vegetables with milk; at midday, fresh fruit or dried apricots kneaded with water; in the evening these same foods, with meat on rare occasions.

    This food seems simple and primitive. It will be found, on amplification, that it is neither simple nor is it primitive in the sense of being crude, and the full understanding of it will not be reached until almost the last pages of this book.

    The Hunza are Moslems, but they do not confine their women, who go about freely. Nor do they refrain from wine. On the contrary, they grow good grapes and enjoy homemade wine. They, and the people of Punyal, indeed, shock the more orthodox Moslems in those parts by their fondness for public jollifications. The Mir, or ruler, treats his visitors to his home-brew and they find it sound and comforting. Bruce suggested to his fellow-geographers that this wine is one of the causes of the great cheeriness of the Hunza.

    Their life is one of the open air, of course, for men, women and children work in the fields. But they have to face the cold and storms of winter. The Hunza houses are often three storeys high and are better built and more light and airy than elsewhere in the Gilgit Agency. Moreover, owing to a shortage of fuel or a liking for better air, the Hunza, though they spend much time indoors during the stormy time of winter, do not fill the main living-room of the house with the dense smoky atmosphere which Durand speaks of as horrible in the houses of the Hindu-Kush generally in mid-winter.

    As regards the disposal of human excrete, the Hunza here, as in other matters of great importance, follow the same principles as the Tibetans and Chinese. They pass their excrete into hidden privies, as do their Tibetan neighbours in Baltistan. From time to time these privies are opened and the material is added to the compost, which they use for the manuring of the soil.

    Their water they keep in closed, separate cisterns, so that their animals cannot drink from them. Open water tanks are provided for their beasts.

    So the Hunza houses are better than their neighbours, their water is separate and protected, and their sanitation has the time-honoured approval of the Far East. Here, in these matters of ventilation, water-supply, and sanitation, they also show superiority; but, especially in winter ventilation, not such as can well account for the superiority of their physique. Something these better ways may well contribute, but not enough to give a full and sufficient reason.

    Schomberg, therefore, asks the question: "Can it be race?" He gives many pages to answering the question.

    As the first settlement of Nagir was from Hunza, the Hunza and Nagiris have been classed as one race. But the first settlement was many centuries ago, and since then many Kashmiris have entered Nagir and overwhelmed the earlier settlers. But they were kept out of Hunza. About the only remnant of relationship between the two peoples is that they both speak the Burushaski tongue. So do some people in Yasin and Punyal. There has been mixture. This is even seen in Hunza. But the majority of the Hunza in Hunza are distinguished by their fair skins, and they themselves scoff at being of the same blood as the smaller, dark Nagiris.

    "Still less," says Schomberg, "are the Hunza folk of the same stock as those of the rest of the Indus valley. It is certainly difficult to understand how anyone, after having dealings with the Hunza people, could imagine that they had anything in common with their neighbours of Nagir, still less with the inhabitants of Gilgit or the Indus valley."

    Their very language is a peculiar and difficult tongue, Burushaski, only spoken in Hunza and parts of Nagir, and a little in Punyal, whose men Schomberg, as already quoted, places as second to the Hunza. Sir Aurel Stein says something very significant about Burushaski in Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan (1906). It has "no-apparent connection with either the Indian or the Iranian family of languages, and seems an erratic block left here by some bygone wave of conquest." How the small race which speaks the language of Hunza has come to occupy these valleys will perhaps never be cleared up by historical evidence. But its preservation between the Dards on the south and the Iranians and Turki tribes on the north is clearly due to the isolated position of the country.

    The Hunza people become now mysterious, as well as men of unequalled physique and health. They are something very old, an erratic block of an ancient world, still perhaps with its peculiar knowledge and traditions, and preserved in that profound cleft of theirs from the decay of time.

    The ruling families of Hunza people make a claim to being descended from the soldiers of Alexander or even from Alexander himself, much as English families like to say their ancestors came over with the Conqueror. High-flown though this may seem, still there is one thing a little strange.

    The Hunza, as Moslems, will not be photographed stripped. That is an unforgivable affront. Yet there is one such photo extant. It shows a man of medium height, broad shoulders, full chest, wide costar arch, narrow waist, small belly and strong legs. If one looks at this photo and then at the Aeginetan Scultpures lodged in the Glyptothek of Munich, one sees rare men of peculiar deep-chested breathing, feeding efficiency and powerful motility. Most strangely and unexpectedly these sculptured men and the photoed Hunza appear the same. The photo might be the statues and the statues the photo.

    Schomberg calls this claim of descent from the great Conqueror fantastic, and so it is, and any speculation with present knowledge upon a possible marvellous nest of purebred preservation of the classic Greek is equally fantastic. All one can say is that this people of Hunza, so unique amongst peoples, is no less unique in its racial characters. Everything suggests that in its remoteness it may preserve from the distant past things that the modern world has forgotten and does not any longer understand. And amongst those things are perfect physique and health.



Chapter II
A REVOLUTION IN OUTLOOK

    ROBERT MCCARRISON, now Major-General Sir Robert McCarrison, qualified as a medical practitioner at Queen's University, Belfast, in 1900. He entered the Indian Medical Service and sailed for India on his twenty-third birthday.

    He was posted as regimental medical officer to the Indian troops, stationed as warden to the frontier march of Chitral, between the Gilgit Agency on the east and Afghanistan on the west, in the heart of a country which, as we shall see in the penultimate chapter, is likely to prove one of the utmost significance in the history of food.

    McCarrison had the inborn mind of a research worker. He quickly displayed it in the accustomed manner of medical research. Eighteen months after his arrival in India he was stationed at the isolated Fort of Drosh. The winter was cold but healthy. In the summer it was hot and dry, and then, as he reports in his Lloyd Roberts Lecture in 1937., "there fell upon us a strange sickness which few escaped." Here was the characteristic opportunity of the young medical research worker--a strange sickness.

    McCarrison seized the opportunity with unalloyed scientific gladness, for the disease was not a serious one--a sharp three day fever. He made every sort of investigation possible with his meagre equipment. He observed and tabulated the outbreak of the epidemic, the nature of its spread, the ages of the sufferers, its great prevalence amongst new-comers, the immunity of those previously attacked, and its absence above a certain altitude. He sent for his microscope and some simple laboratory apparatus. He examined hundreds of blood films for malaria and found it absent. Quinine also had no eject on the fever or its symptoms. He tried to grow microbes from the blood of patients and failed. He inoculated volunteers with the blood of the affected with no result. He made mosquito-surveys and sand-fly-surveys, to see if the fever was possibly conveyed by their bites. He finally came strongly to suspect sand-flies as the conveyers of the disease, and again and again submitted volunteers to bites by these insects, which had been fed on fevered patients, and again with no result. So he published his results without proving the cause, and "Three-day Fever of Chitral" figured in the text-books. Soon it was recognised that this fever prevailed, as McCarrison predicted, in other parts of India, and also in Dalmatia, Malta, Crete, and other Mediterranean stations. In 1908 Doerr confirmed McCarrison's suspicions, and the disease henceforth came to be known as sand-fly fever.

    The young McCarrison followed this excellent piece of research with one which still claims his interest, though that interest has now merged into the greater one of his later work.

    In his Milroy Lectures of 1912 he described what the research worker, working by means of the outlook of disease, regards as a piece of good fortune. In the Gilgit Agency, to which he was appointed surgeon 1904-I911, another experiment on a grand scale in disease, not health, was being carried out by nature, in a manner that excited his keen interest. The disease was that of goitre, or enlargement of the thyroid gland, which lies in front of the wind-pipe.

    In the introduction of his first lecture he expressed his joy in being provided with a suitable subject for his abilities in these words: "Having the good fortune to reside for some ten years in a part of India where goitre and cretinism prevail with great intensity, and which is probably one of the purest regions of endemic goitre in the world, I have had exceptional opportunities for carrying out extensive observations and experiments, not only on animals, but on man also." He then went on to describe his researches to date. Needless to say they were thorough and profitable. They were based on the disease as exhibited particularly in the nine villages which are collectively known as Gilgit, where he himself was stationed. He succeeded so well in his research that he was eventually able to give himself and fifteen volunteers the local disease and then to cure it. There's no need to go into the course of these researches, interesting and illuminating though they are. The chief effect, from the point of view of this book, is that they led to McCarrison being relieved of the routine duties of a medical officer and separated as a research worker. In 1913 he was transferred to the Central Institute, Kasauli, with its well-equipped laboratories, to pursue his investigations with all the advantages which well-equipped laboratories scientific colleagues and literature offer.

    In 1912, Sir Gowland Hopkins had made public his work on accessory food factors, to which Casimir Funk a year later gave the name of vitamins. McCarrison, reading the work, at once thought that maybe a very important clue to the enigma of goitre lay in a deficiency of vitamins in the food which goitrous people eat. So he began experiments in the Kasauli laboratory designed to give pigeons goitre. He fed them on diets defective in vitamins. Something different happened. The birds did not develop goitre, but some of them, as was expected, developed a disease called polyneuritis. Then it was found that these birds were overrun by specific microbes. Now came the surprise. Some of the healthy birds, the stock of the laboratory who were well fed before any experiments were tried upon them, also harboured these microbes, but they were not ill. The ill-fed birds, on the other hand, were mortally sick. If, however, the healthy birds were fed on the food defective in vitamins, they too got the polyneuritis and died. Good feeding, it seemed, protected the birds against the microbes, but faulty feeding led to a microbic triumph. Thus was McCarrison brought into a field of "deficiency diseases," that is to say diseases due definitely to faulty food. Then came the War, and nothing more was done in research until 1918.

    Now, it must be carefully noted that up to this time McCarrison's research work, brilliant though it was, ran on the conventional medical lines. It was concerned with certain diseases and it had the outlook of disease--such is the cause of Chitral three-day fever, such are the causes of goitre, of cretinism, of pigeon's polyneuritis, and so on. There was no revolution of outlook as yet.

    In 1918 McCarrison returned to research under the Research Fund Association of India. He took up the study of deficiency diseases, which had first excited his interest, as a side issue of his work at Kasauli on goitre.In 1921 he published a book entitled Studies in Deficiency Diseases.

    Now studies in deficiency diseases clearly entail for contrast the picture, if not the study, of efficient animals. Animals or birds, which are kept for experiments, are kept in ordinary health by hygienic care and sound food. They are, for this reason, known as controls, for it is by comparison of their condition with that of their experimented comrades that the effect of any experimental testing can be observed.

    It was when his mind was dwelling on the healthy that the picture of the people of Hunza returned to McCarrison.

    When he was Agency Surgeon at Gilgit the Hunza, though sixty miles away, were his official patients. Like other Europeans who met them, he was greatly impressed by their fine physique, but his research-brain was busy on illness, goitre and cretinism in particular, and these illnesses, like most others, the Hunza failed to get. As a people they offered very poor fare to a researching physician.

    The ultimate objects of McCarrison's experiments on faultily fed animals were, of course, human. They were to find out what and to what degree diseases in Indian peoples were caused by faulty food. So the memory of the Hunza came back to McCarrison with peculiar vividness. They had no such diseases. They came before McCarrison as a picture of the high attainment man can reach in health and physique.

    "My own experience," he wrote in his book, "provides an example of a race unsurpassed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general. I refer to the people of the State of Hunza, situated in the extreme northernmost point of India. . . . Amongst these people the span of life is extraordinarily long; and such service as I was able to render them during the seven years I spent in their midst was confined chiefly to the treatment of accidental lesions, the removal of senile cataract, plastic operations for granular lids, or the treatment of maladies wholly unconnected with food supply."

    There were two diseases of the eyes, cataract in old people and irritation of the inner lining of the lids. If the winter ventilation of the living-rooms in Hunza had been better, even though not so foul as that of most houses in the Hindu-Kush, which, Durand wrote, choked the unfortunate inhabitants, these two diseases might also have been excluded.

    In his Mellon Lecture, delivered at Pittsburg, in the U.S.A., in 1922, on "Faulty Food in Relation to GastroIntestinal Disorder," this people of the remote Himalayas, whose name he did not give to his American audience, but undoubtedly the Hunza and such allied people as the Punyalis, again presented themselves to him--almost as control human beings in the vast laboratory of nature, in which civilised people, and especially Americans, were very prone to gastro-intestinal disorders.

    "During the period of my association with these people," he said, "I never saw a case of asthenic dyspepsia, of gastric or duodenal ulcer, of appendicitis, of mucous colitis, of cancer. . . . Among these people the 'abdomen over-sensitive' to nerve impressions, to fatigue, anxiety or cold was unknown. The consciousness of the existence of this part of their anatomy was, as a rule, related solely to the feeling of hunger. Indeed, their buoyant abdominal health has, since my return to the west, provided a remarkable contrast with the dyspeptic and colonic lamentations of our highly civilized communities."

    So the picture of a healthy people in 1921-2 strongly coloured McCarrison's thought.

    His work on deficiency diseases was, as has been said, to discover their prevalence in India. One aspect of this study had been of peculiar importance to the Government, namely the prevalence of the diseases amongst the native troops during the War. The Government had to be informed what foods their soldiers should take to avoid these diseases, if possible, in future campaigns.

    This, fortunately, brought McCarrison into research contact with the fighting races of India--Punjabis, Dogras, Rajputs, Brahmins, Jats, Ghoorkas, Pathans, and Sikhs. It did not, however, bring any Hunza men again under his observation, for, though. there had at one time been the Hunza Rifles, to whose marching powers Bruce testified in our first chapter, they were soon disbanded, and further enlistment of the Hunza in any form prohibited, owing to the strong objection of the Mir to his subjects leaving the country.

    Of these fighting men, McCarrison selected the Pathans and Sikhs as men of exceptional physique. He grouped them in his mind and writing henceforth with the Hunza, though he always gave the Hunza the premier place. A brief account of these two fighting peoples is therefore necessary.

    Looking at a map of Afghanistan, one sees that its northeastern corner projects a long thin tongue to the east. This forms a northern cap to Chitral and the Gilgit Agency, and its tip touches the Hunza river cleft.

    Near Chitral town the eastern border of Afghanistan turns sharply south. Between it and the plains of the Punjab are the North-west Frontier Provinces. This is the country of the Pathans.

    The Pathans, therefore, are not the immediate neighbours of the Hunza, nor are they allied to them in race. The Pathans are in part Semitic, their neighbours, the Afghans, being yet more Semitic. The Pathans call themselves Beni-Israel, as descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

    But they are like the people of Hunza in that they are great hillsmen, though their mountains are not so vast. But in their life as hillsmen-agriculturalists, they form a group with the hillsmen of Eastern Afghanistan, of Chitral and of the Gilgit Agency. The significance of this will be seen in the penultimate chapter upon the Hunza Foods.

    There are about a million Pathans. They are a very vigorous people. Here is an account of the famous Afridi Pathans, who live in the neighbourhood of the Khyber Pass: "The Afridi, in appearance, is generally a fine, tall athletic highlander, whose springy step, even in traversing the dirty streets of Peshawur, at once denotes his mountain origin." His appearance immediately prejudices Englishmen in his favour and "there are few brought into contact with him who do not at least begin with an enthusiastic admiration of his manliness. "

    The Sikhs are not hillsmen, but belong to the river plains of the Punjab. They are a religious, not a racial community. The greater number of them are converted Jats. They are an independent people and admirable agriculturists. "In agriculture," wrote Captain Bingley, The Sikhs (1899) "the Jat-Sikh is pre-eminent. No one can rival him as a landowner or yeoman cultivator. He calls himself a Zamindar, or husbandman, as often as a Jat, and his women and children work with him in the fields. Indeed, it is a common saying in the Punjab that the Jat's baby has a ploughshare for a plaything."

    The Sikh is, up at dawn and at work in his field, taking a little food left over from the previous day before he leaves his home. About midday, when the sun gets powerful, his women bring him out a substantial meal of coarse ground wheaten chapattis smeared with butter, porridges of grains and pulses, vegetables, and when in season, raw, green gram or sarson. He washes all this down with copious draughts of spiced buttermilk, which he calls lassi. He takes a further substantial meal of similar foods at the end of the day's work. He eats sprouting gram. He eats fruit, though he cannot get the abundance of it which Hunza and Pathans get. He takes meat sparingly, sometimes freely.

    He works hard, but he is spared the necessitous exercise which the mountains force upon the Hunza and Pathan. Nevertheless, he likes extra exercise in the way of sports and games. He is fond of running and jumping, lifting and tossing weights, throwing quoits, or wielding huge wooden clubs. When young he is fond of wrestling. But, as Bingley observed, the Jat-Sikh is usually too much occupied with agricultural labour to spare much time for games.

    Such were the pick of the fighting men of India whom McCarrison associated with the Hunza in the perfection of their physique. "The Sikhs, the Pathans, and certain Himalaya tribes, than whom it would be difficult to find races, whether in the east or west, of finer physical development, hardihood and powers of endurance," he wrote in an article in The Practitioner in 1925, and then gave the premier place to the Hunza: "These people are unsurpassed by any Indian race in perfection of physique; they are long-lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general."

    It is clear in this article of 1925 upon "The Relationship of Diet to the Physical Efficiency of Indian Races" that McCarrison's review of the fighting had removed him from the conventional attitude of medical research to an overriding interest in healthy peoples. The question that now presented itself to his mind was: "How is it that man can be such a magnificent physical creature as the Hunza, the Sikh, or the Pathan?"

    Health is wholeness. The careful reader of McCarrison's Studies in Deficiency Diseases will note that wholeness lay in the very texture of his mind. The work reveals an intellectual passion for wholeness. Up to that time, as he himself later pointed out in the Lloyd Roberts Lecture, research workers in malnutrition had studied the effects of faulty food upon the nerves, the eyes, the bones, and so on. They fragmented the subject. He was the first "to survey the whole realm of the body by microscopic means." He had to see wholly. One can, indeed, watch this sense of wholeness increasing in his work, until it shaped itself in the whole view of health which will be presented in the last chapter.

    So when he had to study the Sikh, Pathan, and others, he seemed to step into what was really quite a new atmosphere of observation. His approach to it was long, but it led him no less surely to a new outlook than did the tracks which brought stout Cortez upon a peak of Darien. McCarrison is now impressed and absorbed by certain people's efficiency, with deficiency only as a background and contrast; by health as a whole thing, and not the medical health, namely, the state which is reached by recovery from a disease. The pyramid of medical art, built up of innumerable studies of an increasing number of diseases, was turned upon its top, and, as a new position, in precarious stability. But McCarrison managed to sustain it, and from the small apex formed by Hunza, Sikh and Pathan physique and health, he proceeded to view the ills of both civilized and uncivilized man.

    This was a complete reversal of the accustomed outlook of medical research. We have all become so weary of revolutions in these days that I fear the very phrase, "a revolution of medical thought," may be objectionable. But that is what this was. The old traditional way of thought, namely, from separate diseases or groups of diseases to the recovery of average health, was displaced by looking from the healthiest procurable peoples to the innumerable ailments and diseases of men. It was in the strictest sense of the word a revolution--a turning round.

    The right-about is the unique character of McCarrison's later research work. It is this which separates it from his earlier research work. Of course, one cannot always draw a mark, as one can across a race track and say: "Here is the start." One could collect many instances of tentative approaches to this change of direction in the work of others as well as that of McCarrison. Every revolution has such presages. But in McCarrison s work this conversion was complete, except for an occasional relapse to the subject of goitre. From this time his work starts from these men of unsurpassed physique, and is an enquiry as to what it was that gave them bodily excellence in such full measure.


Chapter III
THE TRANSFERENCE TO EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE

    IN 1927 McCarrison was appointed Director of Nutrition Research in India under the Research Fund Association. He was not only director, he was, as he told the members of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, the only officer engaged on work on nutrition, so he had, as it were, only to direct himself. He was given a laboratory and headquarters at Coonoor, upon the beautiful Nilgiri plateau of the Madras Presidency, and there he directed his work and that of his excellent Indian assistants to the transference of the health of Hunza, Sikh and Pathan to experimental science.

    For this work McCarrison chose albino rats. Rats are largely used in nutritional laboratories. They offer many advantages for experimental work on foods. They are omnivorous and they like practically all human food. They are small animals, and therefore cheap to feed; they breed readily in captivity, and their span of life is short, so that their whole life history can be watched.

    The first object of McCarrison was to see if the rats in their small sphere of life could be made exceptional in physique and health. He put them in good conditions of air, sunlight, and cleanliness, and he chose as a diet for them one based on those of the three people of excellent physique, the Hunza, the Pathan, and the Sikhs.

    He did not, however, give the full diet of any of these peoples in one particular, that of fruit. The Hunza eat fresh and dried fruit abundantly. The Pathans are also large eaters of fruits. The Sikhs, with a climate less suitable to fruit, eat less than the Hunza and Pathan. They cannot be distinguished as great fruit eaters. The rats were given no fruit. The foods they received were those of these peoples of northwestern India minus fruit.~

    The diet given to the rats was chapattis, or flat bread, made of wholemeal wheat flour, lightly smeared with fresh butter, sprouted pulse, fresh raw carrots and fresh raw cabbage ad libitum, unboiled whole milk, a small ration of meat with bones once a week, and an abundance of water, both for drinking and washing.

    In this experiment 1,189 rats were watched from birth to the twenty-seventh month, an age in the rat which corresponds to that of about fifty-five years in man. The rats were killed and carefully examined at all ages up to the twenty-seventh month of life by naked-eye post-mortem examination.

    The result was very remarkable. Disease was abolished. This astonishing consequence, however, must be given in McCarrison's own words in the first of two lectures given at the College of Surgeons in 1931.

    "During the past two and a quarter years there has been no case of illness in this 'universe' of albino rats, no death from natural causes in the adult stock, and, but for a few accidental deaths, no infantile mortality. Both clinically and at post-mortem examination this stock has been shown to be remarkably free from disease. It may be that some of them have cryptic disease of one kind or another, but, if so, I have failed to find either clinical or macroscopical evidence of it."

    By putting the rats on a diet similar to that of certain peoples of Northern India, the rats became "hunzarised," that is they "enjoyed a remarkable freedom from disease," words used by McCarrison in 1925 of the Hunza. They even went further. Except for an occasional tape worm cyst they had no visible disease at all.

    Now, the reader might think that a statement that any small "universe" had been freed from disease would have created a profound impression amongst medical men. It did not do so, any more than Lister's announcement of the.first results of antiseptic surgery created any stir. In Lister's days surgeons were so accustomed to pus and blood poisoning, they could not think in terms of a surgery without them. Similarly, medical men are so accustomed to a great number of diseases, they cannot think of any small "universe" without disease. In all revolutions this is the case It is the established profession, or class or aristocracy, which finds it most difficult to think in terns the change.

    This is very noticeable in the professional comments of that time upon McCarrison's lectures. Actually they were very meagre. I only found one reference in the corresponding columns of the leading journals of the few weeks following the lectures. The British Medical Journal itself did, however, devote a leading article. This article treated McCarrison's work purely from the point of view of diseases which diet would prevent or help to prevent. It overlooked the astonishing relation of a remarkable health of human groups being transferred to rats as a perfect health.

    "We are passing from a period in which bacteria were held of more surgical importance than diet to one in which a knowledge of diet is to be regarded as more important than a knowledge of bacteria. It is the physician or dietitian who is leading the way. Who would have thought ten years ago that an error in diet would render us liable to such diverse conditions as middle-ear disease, duodenal ulcer, renal calculus or cystitis?" One notes it is liability to diseases, not remarkable health, that is the underlying philosophy.

    It is in one sense, nevertheless, fair comment on the lectures themselves. Being prepared especially for surgeons, they were given a surgical setting, and were, therefore, gathered around a number of surgical diseases. It was indeed this familiar setting which caused the unfamiliar significance of the transfer of the remarkable health of certain humans to the rats to be dimmed. This was the light which should have shone forth amidst the familiar murk of human illness. This was the positive meaning, the health or whole meaning of the experiment.

    The health was transferred by foods. It was not, as we shall see, transferred by any particular hygienic methods common to the Hunza and the rats. In air, light, etc., there were some resemblances, but in scientific hygiene that of the rats was superior.

    First, as regards climate, Coonoor stands 6,ooo feet high and Hunza is nearly 8,000 feet high. Coonoor is on a tableland and its climate is equable, the annual range of temperature being from 50 degrees to 80 degrees Fahr. It has not that hard, cold winter of Hunza, in which for two months, having little to do outside, the people spend their time in stuffy rooms. The rats in their roomy cages got plenty of air and sunlight all the year round.

    So in the matter of domestic ventilation, the rats were better off then the humans. It was the humans who in winter were wont to live in atmospheres like those of rat-holes.

    The Hunza have no fear abroad or at home, but rats are timid when living in airy cages and sunlight and unable to hide. So, to avoid fear and its bad effect on health, the rats were screened from observation and their attendants were trained to attend upon them without alarming them.

    Their cages were hosed out once a day, they were daily put in the sun, and they were lined daily with clean straw. The test of cleanliness was that no smell at all could be detected in the room where the cages were kept. It cannot be said that, in spite of different habits, the Hunza houses were more hygienic than this. The balance here lies with the rats.

    In natural exercise and in adventure in getting the means of life the rats were restricted. The cages were large enough for the animals to move about in their slow cautious way, with little darts forward, but not for the hot scamper of danger, which calls upon the supremest physical qualities, such as the Hunza show as cragsmen in perilous places. Here the fortune lay with Hunza or rat, according as one values adventure or safety first as a factor of health.

    These additional "environmental conditions: cleanliness and comfort," as McCarrison calls them, were not, therefore, common to rat and Hunza. An exact imitation of Hunza or Pathan conditions was not possible in these particulars. They were, therefore, so arranged that they were good and constant. They were kept the same for all the rats in all McCarrison's experiments. Then, if one batch of rats with one diet kept well and another with another diet got ill, the conclusion that the diet in the second case was faulty was obvious. This is a common method of experimental science.

    The only thing, therefore, that was common to rat and man in this first experiment was the diet. Here in the great cleft of Hunza was a little oasis of a few thousand beings of almost perfect health, and here in the cages of Coonoor was a little oasis of a thousand and more albino rats also in perfect health. The only link connection between these two otherwise dissimilar sets of living things was a similar kind of diet.

    McCarrison now linked up other batches of rats in the same constant conditions of cleanliness and comfort with other peoples of India by their diets. He was in a most enviable position for trying out diets as a whole. The Indian subcontinent provides so many different races and different habits and diets. Hence McCarrison was able to sit in his sanctum at Coonoor and connect up his rats with teeming peoples near and far, and in the mirror of the rats read the dietetic fates of the peoples.

    He took the customary diets of the poorer peoples of Bengal and Madras, consisting of rice, pulses, vegetables, condiments, perhaps a little milk. He gave these to rats.

    Now, this diet immediately opened the lid of Pandora's box for the rats of Coonoor, and diseases and miseries of many kinds flew forth.

    McCarrison made a list of them as found by him in 2,243 rats fed on faulty Indian diets. Here it is as given by him at the Royal College of Surgeons in, necessarily, technical language: "Lung diseases: pneumonia, broncho-pneumonia, bronchiectasis, pyothorax, pleurisy, haemothorax.

    "Diseases of the nose and accessory sinuses: sinusitis.

    "Diseases of the ear: otitis media or pus in the middle ear.

    "Diseases of the upper respiratory passages: adenoid growths.

    "Diseases of the eye: conjunctivitis, corneal ulceration, keratomalacia, panophthalmitis.

    "Gastro-intestinal diseases: dilated stomach, gastric ulcer, epithelial new growths in the stomach, cancer of the stomach (in two cases only), duodenitis, enteritis, gastro-intestinal dystrophy, stasis.

    "Diseases of the urinary tract: pyonephrosis, hydronephrosis, pyelitis, renal calculus, ureteral calculus, dilated ureters, vesical calculus, cystitis, incrusted cystitis.

    "Diseases of the reproductive system: inflammation of the uterus, ovaritis, death of the foetus in utero, premature birth, uterine hemorrhage, hydrops testis.

    "Diseases of the skin: loss of hair, dermatitis, abscesses, gangrene of the tail, gangrene of the feet, subcutaneous cedema.

    "Diseases of the blood: anemia, a 'pernicious' type of anaemia, Bartonella Muris anaemia.

    "Diseases of the Iymph and other glands: cysts in the submaxillary glands and accessory glands in the base of the tongue, abscesses in the same, and occasionally also in the inguinal glands, enlarged adrenal glands, atrophy of the thymus, enlarged mesenteric, bronchial and other lymph glands.

    "Diseases of the endocrine system: Iymph-adenoid goitre, and, very occasionally, hemorrhage into the pancreas.

    "Diseases of the nervous system: polyneuritis.

    "Diseases of the heart: cardiac atrophy, occasionally cardiac hypertrophy, myocarditis, pericarditis, and hydropericardium.

    "Oedema."

    That is the complete list. Freeing it of its technical dressing, in plain English it means that the rats, which were fed on the diets eaten by millions of Indians of Bengal and Madras, got diseases of every organ they possessed, namely eyes, noses, ears, lungs, hearts, stomachs, intestines, kidneys, bladders, reproductive organs, blood, ordinary glands, special glands, and nerves. The liver and the brain, it may be noted, do not occur in the list. The liver was as a fact found to be diseased in conjunction with the diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. The examination of the brain requires a careful opening of the small bony brain case of the rat and adds greatly to the time needed for post-mortem examinations.

    This list denotes a pretty comprehensive lot of troubles to be loaded on to simple little creatures like rats as a result of eating faulty Indian diets. In a list given flve years later in the Cantor Lectures McCarrison adds a few further diseases, such as general weakness, lassitude, irritability, loss of hair, ulcers, boils, bad teeth, crooked spines, distorted vertebra and so on.

    Considering again the simplicity of the rat and its limitation in things human, the list is, comparatively speaking, almost as complete as the list of contents of a stately text-book of medicine. The diseases of the mind and other very special diseases are omitted. One cannot exactly diagnose neurasthenia, hysteria, and schizophrenia in the rat.

    Yet even in rats conditions like to these arise from faulty diet. For example, in later experiment, McCarrison gave a set of rats the diet of the poorer classes of England; white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, boiled vegetables, tinned meats and jams of the cheaper sort. On this diet, not only did the rats grow badly, but they developed what one might call rat-neurasthenia, and more than neurasthenia. "They were nervous and apt to bite their attendants; they lived unhappily together, and by the sixteenth day of the experiment they began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them."

    We can add neurasthenia and ferocity to weaker brethren to the list.

    We are left then at the end of these experiments with two vividly contrasted sets of little animals in this small "universe" of Coonoor--those on good and those on faulty diet; the healthy and the sickly; and certain mental characters, in contrast, the good tempered and live-and-let-live on the one hand, the bad-tempered and cannibalistic on the other.

    And it must be carefully noted that in the case of the healthy rats, the diet was a whole thing. Not only was it their diet from weaning to death, but they mothers were "stock" rats, that is to say, they were being fed on the diet of certain peoples of north-western India, when their offspring were conceived, when they were carrying thern, and when they were giving them the breast. The importance of this will be seen in the next chapter.