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  • The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy
  • José G. Rigau-Pérez
E. Chaves-Carballo . The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy. Eastbourne, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2007. xx + 260 pp. Ill. $75.00 (ISBN-10: 1-84519-183-8, ISBN-13: 978-1-84519-183-2).

Samuel T. Darling is remembered as the pathologist who first described histoplasmosis. At the Ancón (later Gorgas) Hospital during the decade of the Panama Canal's construction, he applied the latest microbiologic knowledge and technology to patient treatments and autopsies, which helped define not only histoplasmosis but also amebiasis and New World leishmaniasis. His interests and accomplishments eventually extended beyond human pathology and laboratory research into medical zoology and entomology.

Darling came to medicine relatively late, graduating at age thirty-one in 1903, and died at age 53 in 1925, after a motor car accident. His first decade of professional activity was spent in Panama; the second, as a Rockefeller Foundation official, spanned the globe. His research on hookworm disease (uncinariasis) in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Fiji from 1915 to 1917 led him to conclude that in high-risk locations, just as infection was nearly universal, treatment should be universally applied, without wasting resources on individual fecal examination. From 1917 to 1920 he directed the Institute of Hygiene in São Paulo, Brazil, where in addition to the training of medical students and public health officers, he continued his research on hookworm and malaria. From 1923 to 1925, he was director of a field station for studies (and training) on malaria in Leesburg, Georgia, until he left on an ill-fated tour of Mediterranean locations with endemic malaria.

Chaves-Carballo recovers Darling's personality from the recollections of descendants, from second-hand stories, and especially from institutional reports, as few personal letters seem to have survived. He uses contemporary sources to produce [End Page 223] vivid descriptions of events Darling surely witnessed, such as a train ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of Panama, without ever presuming to know Darling's thoughts. The pathologist seems to have "loved to work in complete isolation" (p. 65), but at the same time was glad to have been "dragged out" of his "shell" by marriage (p. 123). To one of his first assistants in Panama, Darling seemed "a critical, merciless task-master," whose "devotion to his work and his ability to improvise and meet all problems never failed him" (p. 65), but a trainee at the field station in Georgia also remembered him as a patient, attentive teacher (p. 152).

The book would have benefited from a more extensive exploration of the impact on Darling's life and career of the Spanish-American and First World wars (barely mentioned), the explanation of unfamiliar terms (such as autopsy diener, misspelled as "deaner," p. 62; punkah, p. 94; mosquito bars, p. 132), and names mentioned without reference to the person's position (e.g., O'Connor, p. 128; Abercrombie, p. 132; and Boyce, p. 135). The author is too quick to attribute Darling's "dogged persistence" (p. 64) and support of a "proper" barrier against miscegenation (p. 97) to a New England upbringing. A more lamentable abridgment is the occasional presentation of Darling's investigations only by the results, without further exploration of the researcher's ability to frame hypotheses and devise methods to prove his conclusions, for example, the identification of Anopheles albimanus as the vector of malaria in the Canal Zone (p. 70). Darling's work on the utility of spleen enlargement prevalence (the "splenic index") as a rapid, low-cost indicator of malaria activity in a community is not explained (pp. 114 and 139).

These suggestions that the book is, perhaps, too short also indicate that the text is interesting, a pleasure to read, and a very useful tool, not just for researchers interested in Darling's work but for anyone investigating the development of scientific knowledge and prevention programs about infectious diseases in tropical areas.

José G. Rigau-Pérez
Universidad de Puerto Rico
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