A VISIT TO THE TROPICAL SCHOOL AT HAMBURG.
By F. M. SANDWITH, M.D,, F.R.C.P.,
Gresham Professor of Medicine, Physician to Out-patients in the Seamen's Hospital Society, Lecturer at the London School of Tropical Medicine and at St. Thomas's Hospital.
(Friday, November 15th, 1907.)
At the end of the Fourteenth International Congress for Hygiene and Demography, held in Berlin last September, some five hundred of us were invited to visit Hamburg, where all the various institutions were thrown open for our inspection. We visited them in five groups, and I took the long-desired opportunity of spending two days at the Hamburg Tropical School. This school, which is officially called the Institute for Diseases peculiar to Ships and to the Tropics, was created in consequence of the need which the State of Hamburg felt for practical and scientific research into marine and tropical diseases. The site was well chosen, because the sanitary service of the port furnishes excellent material for the work. The Institute was also founded to give special instruction to medical officers of the mercantile marine service.
In the year 1900, following close upon the creation of the London and Liverpool Schools of Tropical Medicine, the old Seamen's Hospital at Hamburg was converted into the Institute, and a new two-storied hospital of fifty-six beds was built in the same compound for the reception of tropical patients, especially seamen.
The Imperial Government of Germany determined about the same time to establish a training school for officers of
