PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION
In this revision it has seemed desirable to adhere to the original plan of the manual as such an arrangement of the contents gives to the student or tropical practitioner a concise and readily accessible presentation of the subject.
Accepting the spirochaetal etiology of yellow fever, as worked out by Noguchi, I have transferred the chapter on this disease to the section dealing with protozoal diseases and have endeavored to present the more important features of the recent extensive additions to our knowledge concerning this scourge of the tropics.
There is not a chapter in the book that has not been carefully revised and brought up to date. Of the revisions made, the most important deal with advances in the study of food deficiency diseases, as will be noted under beriberi and pellagra.
I have enlarged various paragraphs on treatment, the additions including descriptions of the treatment of hookworm disease by carbon tetrachloride and of the methods of administering arsphenamine and antimony.
Six new chapters have been added to the book, viz. [Epidemic jaundice], [rat bite fever], [tularaemia], [tables of helminthic] and [arthropodan diseases], [trench fever], in Part I, and, in Part II, a chapter on the [diagnostics of tropical joint, muscle and bone lesions].
Extensive additions have been made to [Chapter XLIII], “Diagnostic problems and procedures, together with cosmopolitan diseases in the tropics”; and in the chapter on [blood examinations] will be found a presentation of our latest views as to acidosis as well as a table giving the significance of the findings in blood chemistry.
Many new illustrations have been added and some of the older ones replaced by others of greater teaching value.
Every effort has been made to retain the feature of a pocket manual but it has been necessary to increase the number of pages from 524 to 610. The illustrations in the third edition numbered 119; in this edition, 159.
In particular I have to express my indebtedness to Commanders C. S. Butler and H. W. Smith of the Naval Medical Corps for advice and assistance in the preparation of this edition. Dr. G. W. McCoy, Director of the Hygienic Laboratory, has given me valued suggestions as to changes in some of the old chapters and in the preparation of the new chapter on Tularaemia.
Lieutenant Commander Bunker, the head of the Chemical Laboratory of the Naval Medical School, has made the revisions of the subjects dealing with physiological chemistry. Others, who have given me advice and suggestions, have been Lieutenant Commander Reed and Lieutenants Harper and Chambers of the Naval Medical School.
To Lieutenant Peterson I am indebted for assistance in the proofreading and preparation of the index as well as in going over the recent literature of tropical diseases.