Tropical Medicine in the Twentieth Century

Helen J Power

Kegan Paul International, £45, pp 284

ISBN 0 7103 0604 0

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“Tropical medicine as a formal discipline is dead and should be buried” was the motion proposed by Gordon Cook at the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine in October 1996. Although the 20th edition of Manson's Tropical Diseases had just been published under his editorship, with his hopes that it would remain the “bible” of tropical medicine, Cook made the case for the demise of the old “colonial” discipline based largely on protozoal and helminthic diseases and the recognition of “medicine of the tropics,” which includes many non-infectious problems and particular aspects …