at when I visited the hospital, and the answers to the
questions that the people cave me, the incidence of hypertension is probably over twenty-five per cent end might
be in the olcer people as high as
forty per cent.
For
seme years now general medical opinion indicate that
hypertension is a stress diseese.
It can be induced in
animals by crowding.
If one takes experimental animals
of small
size,
--
rodents,
for example,
--
and puts
into large cages where they ere free to move about,
ls no particular increase in hypertension.
them
there
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, inedequate 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 inciGence 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 aes a disease.
For exemple, Easter Islanders,
an island off the coast of Chile, have no hypertension
when they remain in their ethnic niche.
travel
there,
When these men
to Chile and enter the ccempetitive economic world
they develope the same ermount_of hypertension as
do the Chileans.
In developed societies breaking of
social patterns by individuals or by croups 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 alwavs 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 @ue 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