Medicine: Eskimos

Eskimos do not suffer from diabetes or cancer, rarely from hardening of the arteries. Yet they subsist almost entirely on meat. The possible relationship between such absence of disease and the peculiar diet of Eskimos led Professor Israel Mordecai Rabinowitch of McGill University Faculty of Medicine to join the Canadian Government’s Eastern Arctic Patrol on a nine-week cruise last summer among the Hudson’s Bay Co. fur trading posts which fringe Hudson Bay and the great islands to the north. Having systematized his clinical, bacteriological, chemical and sociological findings among the Eskimos, Dr. Rabinowitch published them last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

When food is abundant, “a healthy Eskimo living under primitive conditions will eat 5 to 10 pounds of meat a day.” Trappers rely on caribou and dried buffalo meat. Hunters eat seal, walrus and whale meat. The Eskimo “has some carbohydrates for approximately two months in the year, in the form of blueberries. He also relishes the stomach contents of the caribou which, throughout the year, contain carbohydrates. . . . The stomach contents are often eaten with seal oil—a salad! When an Eskimo catches a walrus he immediately opens the stomach and eats all of the clams. . . . The Eskimos eat the livers of practically all animals, except that of the white bear. . . . Only when in need does he consume very large quantities of fat. Blubber is not regarded as a delicacy.”

That diet supplies all the proteins, fats and carbohydrates which the Eskimos need to thrive on. Whenever they adopt white men’s flour, they develop alkalosis. Seal meat is the Arctic purgative.

Eskimos “can tolerate pain, extreme cold, and fatigue.” When the Montreal doctor stopped at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island, he encountered a native who, impatient at the delay of healing a frozen foot, had shortly before amputated the gangrenous portion himself. The wound was healing and the man, “with the aid of a cane, assisted at the unloading of the cargo.”

As the result of assisting at the birth of an Eskimo baby, Dr. Rabinowitch suggests that “our obstetricians have something to learn from the Eskimo about the mechanics of labor. The child is born with the mother in a squatting position. She is supported in this position by three women. . . . Birth apparently is not a very painful matter judging from the expression of this woman as I watched her for some time. . . . She was in labor for about twelve hours only. Except for the administration of some castor oil and i c.c. of pituitrin, my activities, as obstetrician, consisted, as the word implies, in standing-by. The child was born ten minutes after the pituitrin was given, and ten minutes later, all in the tent—eleven women, the patient, and the writer—enjoyed cigarets.”

Meat-eating Eskimos suffer from nosebleed because their blood is over-rich in red cells. Dr. Rabinowitch thinks the overproduction of red cells is due to the abundance of copper in seafood. Eskimos do not suffer from diabetes, he believes, because long ago those who might have been susceptible died before they could breed susceptible children. He found only one case of what might have been cancer, several cases of arteriosclerosis among Eskimos living at the white settlements. No such cases were located among the most northerly, isolated Eskimos.

In general, the farther from white men the Eskimos live the healthier they remain. In spite of having “no sense whatever of sanitation,” they are “remarkably free from infection.” Their population is increasing and, since the Eskimo is indispensable to the fur industry, the Hudson’s Bay Co. takes good care to keep him alive and healthy in Nature’s own way.