“A PRODIGAL SON”

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 113, 6 February 1935, Page 10

“A PRODIGAL SON”

Professor Revisits New Zealand BATTLES AGAINST DISEASE ’’l’m only a prodigal son returning,” remarked Professor E. A. Scagar, an arrival at Wellington yesterday by tlie Tainui from London, when approached by a ‘’Dominion” representative. He explained that he left New Zealand about 30 years ago, when his father. Air. Edward Seagar/was in engineering work in Wellington, and had returned to see his 85-year-old mother in Auckland. When he left New Zealand it was first to study in Edinburgh, he said. Then he went into a series of positions in London hospitals, i was in France with the Royal Medical Corps, and after that was under the Siamese Government at Bangkok as surgeon to the hospital there. “Bangkok was a fairly primitive place in those days,” he remarked, “but the hospitals -was mainly founded by the ’ British and Americans, We had to deal with a tremendous amount of disease. The hospital has developed very much since then.”

Professor Scagar next went to America under the Rockefeller Foundation and worked in various hospitals and laboratories. He was appointed to the Rockefeller Chair of Tropical Diseases in the Imperial College, Trinidad, and more recently was chief medical .officer in the Barbadoes. He returned to London about three years ago to undertake research work on virus diseases.

Speaking of his work in the Barbadoes, Professor Seagar mentioned the present malaria epidemic in Ceylon and recalled that the Barbadoes had bad a similar epidemic some years ago. ’jin places such as Trinidad was, when they have been previously free of epidemics, it .sweeps through tlie country like a prairie lire,” he said.