Civilization and Disease

Psychoanalysis has been a stimulus to the medical investigator to compare the behavior, habits, practices and diseases of the primitive tribes in various parts of the world with the same traits and customs in the form in which they are exhibited in civilized life, from the jumping off point of analysis of mental mechanisms producing the neuroses. Since Margaret Mead and Malinowski have made studies of South Sea Island tribes with particular reference to their sexual behavior, which in turn is considered significant in giving rise to neurotic conditions, the subject is not new. The present writer has gone further. To a medical officer from primitive backwaters, the fact was stressed on his return to England that the diseases which he had observed among natives were dissimilar to those which were common in Britain. Carefully making an analysis of the proportion of various types, of conditions observed under civilized modes