at when I visited the hospital, and the answers to the questions that the people gave me, the incidence of hyper- tension is probably over twenty-five per cent and might be in the older people as high as forty per cent. For some years now general medical opinion indicate that hypertension is a stress disease. It can be induced in animals by crowding. If one takes experimental animals of small size, -- rodents, for example, -- and puts them into large cages where they are free to move about, there is no particular increase in hypertension. If one puts them in small cages where they are crowded a good deal, and particularly puts them in positions where, because of inadequate space or, inadequate food, competition between them for sustenance and living space developes, then the incidence of experimental hypertension increases very greatly. It has increased in western peoples in time of stress. A study in Texas City in our own nation some fifteen years ago found that when a ship blew up in the harbor, the ship carrying ammonium nitrate, and much of the seaward portion of the city was destroyed, the incidence of hypertension in the town rose greatly. It has been found also that when people with no particular ethnic hypertension are moved to areas of substantial stress in which they have to accommodate to new problems, hypertension emerges as a disease. For example, Easter Islanders, an island off the coast of Chile, have no hypertension when they remain in their ethnic niche. When these men travel to Chile and enter the competitive economic world there, they develope the same amount of hypertension as do the Chileans. In developed societies ‘breaking of social patterns by individuals or by groups does lead to hypertension. Captain James Graham some forty years ago found that the soldiers of the British Fifth Army after defeating with Rommel's forces in North Africa developed a substantial frequency of hypertension which could not be always relieved by simple rest. Even after keeping the soldiers in a rest zone for months, some of them left with fixed hypertension which they did not have before the start of this battle. Consequently I believe that the high incidence of hypertension is in part due to the cultural upheaval that has been induced in these islands by the results, direct or indirect, of the atomic bombs. There very likely are other forces here that have induced