Dr Albert Schweitzer, the celebrated humanitarian, wrote that, 'on my arrival in Gabon in 1913 I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer... I can not, of course, say positively that there was no cancer at all, but like other frontier doctors, I can only say that if any cases existed they must have been quite rare'. An Alaskan doctor reported that in his thirty-six years of practice he had never seen a case of malignant disease among the truly primitive Eskimos and Indians although it occurred frequently when they become modernised. Since 1840, similar findings have been reported by doctors for native people throughout the world.