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382 The eighth Jubilee Edition of Tropical Medicine: A Clinical Text concludes with some personal reflections on my own professional journey. When the initial chapters of my first book were serialized in the New York State Journal of Medicine in 1961, I was a young physician who had been introduced to tropical infections on a fellowship in Calcutta, India. I was fascinated by the history of epidemic diseases, by the dramatic clinical presentations, and by the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges they pose. In Calcutta, I fell in love with a way of life, seeming to find romance in settings that others might—quite legitimately—see only as dirty, broken-down wastelands. Surely those negatives existed in Calcutta. But amidst the fetid stenches of Indian urban decay, I mainly recall the strong aroma of exotic spices. I close my eyes and see saffron robes rather than soiled rags. I hear music in the cacophonous sounds of the slums and in the long silence of a city drenched in the humid heat that comes with the monsoon rains. Over the next four months I attended, every morning, clinical rounds at the All India Institute of Tropical Medicine. But being young and indefatigable, I also spent every afternoon helping to tend the dying in a gutter with a then-unknown Albanian nun whom the world now remembers as Mother Teresa. I was immersed in a wonder-filled, strange culture, and I faced utterly new challenges and, just as important, new opportunities. One of the most important lessons of India that has remained with me for life and helped determine what I have tried to do, and how, was the realization that one must stay calm and focused in the midst of chaos if one wanted to help others . There was no time for self indulgent, personal concerns. The petty needs that so often dominate our lives distract us from getting critical tasks accomplished. One quickly learned that our own individual cares simply did not matter much in the face of what others were suffering every day, all day, in the disaster that life offered them. The Evolution of a Tropicalist Kevin M. Cahill, M.D. CH30_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p381-388.indd 382 CH30_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p381-388.indd 382 2/13/13 11:16 PM 2/13/13 11:16 PM THE EVOLUTION OF A TROPICALIST 383 Fortune continued to bless my nascent career in tropical medicine. At the beginning of the 1960s, due to the ever-expanding war in Vietnam, doctors in the United States were drafted into military service. I was assigned to the US Navy Medical Corps and, blessedly, was first allowed to complete a degree at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine before being sent to Naval Medical Research Unit 3 in Cairo, Egypt. As the Unit’s Head of Epidemiology and Director of Clinical Tropical Medicine, I undertook, over the next few years, field investigations in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Turkey, and across the Middle East. Once again, I discovered beauty in areas that are most often described as desolate. The arid deserts and harsh bush of Somalia and the even more difficult, sodden, mosquito-laden swamps of South Sudan became my favored places for epidemiologic exploration. These journeys gave direction to my own medical and academic career as a tropicalist. During this period, I became increasingly aware of the extramedical, complex demands one faced in dealing with the trauma of natural and man-made disasters in areas where there were few resources. These developing, often newly independent nations could barely cope in relatively stable times. In the face of famine, drought, floods and civil wars, these societies—and their very basic health services—quickly collapsed. On my discharge from the Navy in the mid-1960s, I established a career pattern that included daily clinical work, teaching, and continued field research. Since then, I have been Director of the Tropical Disease Center at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and Clinical Professor of Tropical Medicine and Molecular Parasitology at the NYU Medical School. For thirty-six years (1969–2006), I was also the Chairman of the Department of International Health and Tropical Medicine at The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and have served as the Consultant in Tropical Medicine for the United Nations Health Service and for numerous international corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I was able to maintain close contact with the realities of life in the tropics through semiannual research trips to Somalia, the Sudan, and Nicaragua, and...

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