Observations by missionary doctors 100 years ago offer clues to fighting cancer and other diseases
“On my arrival in Gabon, I was astonished to encounter no cases of cancer,” Schweitzer noted. “I can not, of course, say positively that there was no cancer at all, but, like other frontier doctors, I can only say that if any cases existed they must have been quite rare.”
It is not as if Schweitzer saw few patients. In the first nine months after he set up his practice, he ministered to 2,000 patients. Over the next four decades, he saw an average of 30 to 40 patients each day and performed three operations a week. By the 1930s, he began to see the first cancer cases emerge, and formed his own conclusions.
“My observations inclined me to attribute this to the fact that the natives were living more and more after the manner of the whites,” he said.
Gary Taubes, a brilliant researcher, chronicles these historical reports from missionaries and other doctors on the frontiers of medicine in his book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories: fats, carbs, and the controversial science of diet and health.” (Anchor Books) Taubes convincingly demonstrates that diseases common to Western civilization emerged in native populations after they adopted a Western diet. Gary Taubes, a brilliant researcher, chronicles these historical reports from missionaries and other doctors on the frontiers of medicine in his book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories: fats, carbs, and the controversial science of diet and health.” (Anchor Books) Taubes convincingly demonstrates that diseases common to Western civilization emerged in native populations after they adopted a Western diet. “The absence of cancer in these populations was profound,” Taubes observes. “There’s no reason to think these missionary doctors were not smart enough to know what they were seeing,” he says. “You could get recognized in a British medical journal at that time if you discovered cancer in a black African.” On the other side of the world from Dr. Schweitzer, Dr. Samuel Hutton began treating patients – primarily Eskimos — at a missionary hospital on the northern coast of Labrador in 1902. Among Eskimos isolated from European settlements, he could not find any cancer, asthma, appendicitis or other “European” diseases. Hutton discovered the Eskimo was a meat eater and the vegetable portion of his diet was practically non-existent.
Even today, in the more isolated Eskimo villages of Alaska, natives still consume about 80-90 percent of their diet from fish, seal, caribou, walrus, eggs, beaver, and other small mammals. Less than five percent of their diet comes from fruit and vegetables, according to naturalist Karen Dodd, a resident of Chugiak, Alaska. “What both Schweitzer and Hutton had witnessed during their missionary years was a ‘nutrition transition,’ Taubes notes. “The more civilized and more westernized the population, the higher the cancer rates.” CONTINUE
