Pessimist's Proposal

A confirmed pessimist as well as a distinguished, patient and learned anthropologist is Dr. Ernest Albert Hooton of Harvard University. Dr. Hooton doubts whether man's evolutionary status has improved appreciably since the end of the Glacial Ages, believes it will get worse unless "the reckless and copious breeding of protected inferiors" is stopped.

That his sardonic mind can also generate constructive ideas, Dr. Hooton proved last week in the leading article of Science, entitled "An Anthropologist Looks at Medicine." Therein he suggested a common ground whereon Anthropology and Medicine might get together for the benefit of mankind.

Medicine and physical anthropology are the only two fields of knowledge concerned exclusively with human biology. Medicine is much more important to the ordinary man, hence is much more lavishly endowed. "Anthropology," explains Dr. Hooton, "reveals many things which most persons prefer not to know, since it harps upon humble and even bestial origins, regards the present status of our species without approbation and can predict for the man of the future no apotheosis but only a multiplication of psychoses, dental caries, malocclusions and fallen arches, together with a full retention of his aboriginal cussedness."

Medicine's store of clinical experience shows gaps which Anthropologist Hooton believes anthropological methods might well help to fill in. "Medical science is nurtured in the fetid atmosphere of pathology and has no chance to breathe pure ozone in the congregation of mentes sanae in corporibus sanis. . . . Doctors are so preoccupied with the sick that they do not know the well and are forced to evolve the normal from their inner consciousness, as the German scholar evolved the camel."

From Anthropology, believes Dr. Hooton, Medicine might gather valuable knowledge of evolutionary origins, from which spring many of man's present physical difficulties. "Man," says the author of Up From the Ape, "is a made-over animal. . . . His ancestors have functioned as arboreal pronogrades [moving on all fours] and brachiators, or arm-progressing tree-dwellers--not to mention more remote stages involving other changes of habitat, posture and locomotion. This protean history has necessitated repeated patching and reconstruction of a more or less pliable and long-suffering organism. The bony framework has been warped and cramped and stretched in one part or another, in accordance with variations in the stresses and strains put upon it by different postures and by changes in body bulk. Joints devised for mobility have been re-adapted for stability. Muscles have had violence done to their origins and insertions and have suffered enormous inequalities in the distribution of labor. Viscera have been pushed about hither and yon, hitched up, let down, reversed and inverted. In making a new machine out of an old one, plenty of spare parts have been left to rattle around inside. There are no few evidences of ungifted, amateur tinkering."

Constructively, Dr. Hooton proposes an Institute of Clinical Anthropology, presumably to be financed by one of "those great philanthropic foundations which alternately establish and allow to perish . . . institutes for research to promote human betterment." Besides growth, old age, immunity and susceptibility, the institute would study norms and variations in physical, mental and nervous structure. New research channels would be fully developed.,: In orthopedics, for example, X-rays and slow-motion pictures would be used to investigate posture and gait from birth to death. The staff would include some physical anthropologists, whose special training and points of view are essential. The U. S. has less than a dozen physical anthropologists paid to devote all their time to their specialty, and more are needed. Meanwhile, overcrowding in the medical profession might be slightly relieved if some graduates could be diverted from practice to a study of anthropological medicine.

Concludes Dr. Hooton: "One might define such an institute as an organization devoted to the purpose of finding out what man is like biologically when he does not need a doctor, in order further to ascertain what he should be like after the doctor has finished with him. I am entirely serious when I suggest that it is a very myopic medical science which works backward from the morgue, rather than forward from the cradle."

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