That tuberculosis is particularly fatal to the Negro race is well known.
Even to-day, after several centuries of natural selection in the United
States, the annual death-rate from consumption among Negroes in the
registration area is 431.9 per 100,000 population (census of 1900) as
compared with 170.5 for the whites; in the cities alone it is 471.0.
That overcrowding and climate can not be the sole factors is indicated
by the fact that the Negro race has been decimated, wherever it has met
tuberculosis. "In the years 1803 and 1810 the British government
imported three or four thousand Negroes from Mozambique into Ceylon to
form into regiments, and of these in December, 1820, there were left
just 440, including the male descendants. All the rest had perished
mainly from tuberculosis, and in a country where the disease is not
nearly so prevalent as in England."[61] Archdall Reid has pointed
out[62] that the American, Polynesian and Australian aborigines, to whom
tuberculosis was unknown before the advent of Europeans, and who had
therefore never been selected against it, could not survive its advent:
they were killed by much smaller infections than would have injured a
European, whose stock has been purged by centuries of natural selection.
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