The Three Valleys of St. Lucia

Abstract

The slaves who were forcibly transported to the New World, their culture and identity smashed, took few things with them. Their diseases were one and along with their muscle power, these were profoundly to affect the countries emerging on the far side of the Atlantic. Yet over two hundred years later some of their descendants would make a unique contribution to the control of one serious disease, schistosomiasis, which afflicts millions all over the world. Their island, St. Lucia in the Caribbean, was to become a natural laboratory for an unusual experiment in medicine, and its people the willing objects of study. The experiment is now considered a classic. Lasting for sixteen years, it was a meticulously conducted research project, remarkably controlled, given that the laboratory was not a room but a country and its inhabitants not mice but human beings.

Science is the art of the soluble.

P. B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble

Politics is the art of the possible.

Prince Bismarck, in conversation with Meyer von Waldeck, August II, 1867