Laughing Death: The Untold Story of Kuru - Softcover

[A] swashbuckling romance of heroic adventure....A poetic description of the terrain and the inhabitants....Evocative...exquisite images of life in New Guinea ....A romantic account of the heroic age of medicine....Zigas enjoys the theatricality of an arresting story....An attention-getting style of writing....His appreciative description of one of his... assistants might well apply to himself: "a great actor, an innocent liar of the most magnificent proportions, and hence very good entertainment." -The New York Times

It has been a difficult, sometimes painful, story to tell in its entirety, but I have done my best to be accurate both in facts and in dates, for I feel that l owe the truth to the many who have become valued acquaintances, and sometimes friends. All these have constantly requested more news of my "Green Dwelling" and my discovery of a fatal neurological disease previously unknown to Western medicine. This book is for them, in lieu of letters that I ought to have written and did not. It is also my concern to produce innocent amusement, unrestricted by canon or precedent, for those who require some relaxation from the fatigue generated by so many parasitic forms of life in this less than perfect world.
My peers, the medical scientists, who read this will realize that this book is neither a scientific treatise, nor a balance-sheet of all the achievements and failures of medical science, but a presentation of the major implications of the factors that continually determine our medical ethics - including some of the less prizeworthy drawbacks.