Medicine: Indian Health

Through most of his history, the American Indian has enjoyed health as good as his white cousin's, and in some ways, better. But in the last century the Indian has suffered grievously: some 350,000, of a total Indian population of 400,000, live on barren reservations in grinding poverty, existing from hand to mouth in crowded, filthy huts with animals and vermin. The scourges that the white man has been most successful in suppressing are especially deadly for the Indian, e.g., diphtheria, tuberculosis, dysentery. Any Indian born today on a reservation has a life expectancy of only 36 years against...

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