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'Medical Testament'
Diseases of Faulty Nutrition
By Sir Robert McCarrison
Transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, 1927

MORE than 2,000 years ago Hippocrates wrote as follows :

'... it appears to me necessary to every physician to be skilled in nature, and to strive to know, if he would wish to perform his duties, what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink, and to his other occupations, and what are the effects of each of them to every one.

'Whoever does not know what effect these things produce upon a man, cannot know the consequences which result from them.

'Whoever pays no attention to these things, or paying attention, does not comprehend them, how can he understand the diseases which befall a man? For, by every one of these things a man is affected and changed this way and that, and the whole of his life is subjected to them, whether in health, convalescence, or disease. Nothing else, then, can be more important or more necessary to know than these things.'

It is strange that, although these words were written so long ago, it is only within the last quarter of a century that we have begun to pay attention to 'what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink', to 'know what effect these things produce upon a man', and, 'to understand the diseases which befall a man' in consequence of them.

In the time at my disposal I can do no more than give a very brief outline of the present state of knowledge of the nutritional or, as I prefer to call them, the malnutritional diseases. I shall not, therefore, concern myself with morbid states which result from the ingestion of food in insufficient quantity, nor with those which may be associated with over-eating, but will confine myself to ailments whose genesis is directly or indirectly dependent upon the improper quality and or the improper balance of food ingested in sufficient quantity.