* * *
Dr. Johnson's ruthless handling of the legend that the inhabitants of St. Kilda always caught colds when a stranger landed on their shores is well-known. Now the immunity of the inhabitants of the Island of Lewis is going the same way. This, I gather, was no legend, but hard fact. It came up, as so many out of the way bits of news do, in the investigations of the Select Committee on Estim- ates into the work of the Medical Research Council. The Chairman (according to the report just published) asked whether research into dental disease was carried on in areas where such disease was prac- tically non-existent. The medical witness under examination said
he knew of no such area. The Island of Lewis had been a case in point, but "even there in the last twenty years things had been going in the wrong direction. . . . Unfortunately the original situa- tion of the inhabitants and their methods of feeding are now becom- ing degenerated into the ordinary methods we adopt here." I admit that I never knew of the previous dental achievements of the islanders of Lewis ; it is none the less distressing to find that they now belong to past history. From the same wide-ranging report I discover that
whenever you dial TIM to set your watch right you are putting money into Mr. Dalton's till. TIM is making a profit of some £90,000 a year. That being so it is satisfactory that what London has been doing for years provincial towns are being enabled to do
in increasing numbers. * * * *
Previous page
