WCP6714

[1] [p. 241]

To the same correspondent¹, who was contemplating going into virgin forests and who expressed his fear of malaria, he replied "There is no special danger of malaria or other diseases in a dense forest region. I am sure this is a delusion, and the dense virgin forests, even when swampy, are, in a state of nature, perfectly healthy to live in. It is man's tampering with them, man's own bad habits of living, that render them unhealthy. Having now gone over all Spruce's² journals and letters during his twelve years' life in and about the Amazonian forests, I am sure this is so. And even where a place is said to be notoriously 'malarious' it is mostly due not to infection only but to predisposition due to malnutrition or some bad mode of living. A person living healthily may, for the most part, laugh at such terrors. Neither I nor Spruce ever got fevers when we lived in the forests and were able to get wholesome food." "Health," he said to the present writer, "is the best resistant to disease, and not the artificial giving of a mild form of a disease in order to render the body immune to it for a season. Vaccination is not only condemned upon the statistics which are used to uphold it, but it is a false principle—unscientific, and therefore doomed to fail in the end."