Central African Journal Of Medicine

In this major synthesis of cross-cultural research, 34 distinguished scientists study 25 common metabolic and degenerative diseases characteristic of all advanced Western nations and then examine their incidence in developing countries, among both hunter-gatherers and peasant agriculturalists. Thus the authors provide a unique opportunity to compare epidemiological data reflecting modern modes of life with data influenced by habits and diets dating back 400 generations to the advent of agriculture, and even 200,000 generations or more to the dawn of man. The results confirm the view that diseases like hypertension, lung cancer, diverticular disease, and appendicitis are maladaptations to environmental factors introduced since the Industrial Revolution. They also demonstrate that such diseases become more prevalent when Western lifestyles are adopted in primitive societies. Certain studies reveal a regression of disease incidence when exercise is increased and a diet high in starch and fiber, low in fat and salt, is resumed--characteristics of a simpler way of life. Western Diseases greatly broadens our perspective on some of the most vexing health problems in our society. It will be an essential reference for epidemiologists, nutritionists, and gastroenterologists in particular.

'Professor Rotberg has given students of African history a detailed and thoroughly documented study of the creation of Malawi and Zambia and much information on the formation and collapse of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. No other scholar has written so full and reliable an account of this recent and complex history. Rotberg had access to hitherto unused official archives and to private correspondence, sources that he supplemented by interviews with many of the European and African participants in the events of the last decades of a century of history. No one can read this story without being impressed by the dizzy speed of change in Africa.'-American Historical Review

For more than a century, historians and writers on Africa have almost invariably associated the name Mlozi with all the cruellest excesses of the central and east African slave trade during the nineteenth century. That Mlozi bin Kazbadema was a significant slaver who conducted his trade according to all the brutal conventions of his period is beyond dispute. His subsequent botched hanging at the end of a British-sponsored rope, following a drum-head trial of questionable legality, has been generally regarded as well-deserved and a fitting, if muscular, exemplar of Pax Britannica in action. In The End of the Slaver, a title taken from recollections of Mlozi's hanging by the medical missionary Dr. Kerr Cross, author David Stuart-Mogg examines Mlozi's life and milieu and carefully weighs the often conflicting evidence apparent between official military and government reports and the largely unpublished private letters and diaries written at the time by those who participated in Mlozi's downfall and elimination. Stuart-Mogg's carefully evaluated findings call into serious question the altruism and philanthropy that the ultimate, and inevitable, victors of the struggle accorded their actions and their undoubtedly laudable ultimate objective - the eradication of slavery in British Central Africa. Referring to this book as 'an unusually stimulating study, Professor Shepperson recommends that The End of the Slaver deserves to be widely-read, not only by those whose primary interest is in the history of Malawi but also by students of slavery and the anti-slavery movements in the nineteenth century - and, indeed by all who are concerned with man's inhumanity to man.

Refined Carbohydrate Foods and Disease: Some Implications of Dietary Fibre addresses the geographical distribution and historical emergence of the characteristically western diseases, which may be accounted for on a common dietary basis, particularly, on deficiency of dietary fiber. The book is divided into 10 parts, each with number of chapters focusing on relationship between disease and the environment; refined carbohydrate foods; various diseases of the large intestine; and other diseases that are associated with constipation, straining at stool, and refined carbohydrate foods. The book shows the role of refined carbohydrate foods as a significant cause of diseases, because it removes fiber, which has many unsuspected physiological functions. This reference is deemed to be useful to forge stronger links between epidemiologists and experimental workers.