A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER I

SHORT NOTICE FOR A LONG CHORE

“Lambert, I’ve got a good one for you this time. I’m sending you to Papua.”

Dr. Victor G. Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation’s famous Director of the East, made this announcement as if Papua were across the street.

“That’s fine, Doctor,” I said, “perfectly fine.”

Papua? Where was Papua? Vainly I fished for scraps of geography and pulled up impressions of palmy islands where black warriors asked guests how they liked their missionary, rare or well done.

Dr. Heiser sat behind a modest desk in one of the smallest rooms at 61 Broadway, delivering a sort of curtain speech to an act that had taken longer than a Chinese play, an act which had played through the war summer of 1918. I had finally found a successor and resigned my superintendency of the United Fruit Company’s hospital in Costa Rica; I was in New York to offer my services. But Uncle Sam wasn’t looking for medical officers with weak eyes.

Now Dr. Heiser’s kindly voice was praising and instructing one of the family, for at last I had joined up with the Foundation. There he was, kneeing his desk, telling me nothing about Papua, saying that my Costa Rican and Mexican experience had particularly fitted me for work with the International Health Board, not mentioning that war had taken away many of their physicians. He dwelt on the preparatory three months’ hookworm training I had already taken, under the Foundation’s auspices, among the hillbillies of Mississippi ... kept me moving, didn’t it, canvassing from door to door?... Lambert, you can work a lot faster down in the South Pacific, where you’ll lecture and treat in batches of from fifty to five hundred.... You’ll have to cover a lot of ground down there.... Take along plenty of khaki, and no evening clothes.... Get your family ready and start day after tomorrow.

“And on your way to Papua, Lambert, you’d better report to Waite, who’s in charge of our work in Australia. There’s quite a hookworm campaign going on in North Queensland. Good place to brush up on what you’ll need in Papua. You’ll find the Australians good fellows, like our Westerners, rough and generous and tolerant—they haven’t had to jam together in big cities and get small-minded.”

During our argumentative stage, I had told Dr. Heiser about a mining syndicate’s offer to take me down to Peru. I didn’t bring that up again, or mention General Gorgas’ half-promise to forgive my blinky eyes and commission me in the venereal section of the Medical Corps.

When I left that morning I was under the spell of the Heiser charm; a charm that has sent armies of scientific men, great and small, to follow jungle trails all over this planet, and work until they drop. In later years I walked with him along some of those trails, and my admiration for him increased every step of the way. There is a godlike something about Heiser that will never let him fall from the pedestal he deserves. Grant him clay toes if you wish, he is still a colossus who has bestridden the field of public health for twenty years—and been the target of much professional jealousy. In 1937 when I was at a League Conference in Java I heard an envious Yankee voice say, “Yes, I’ve read his American Doctor’s Odyssey, and I wonder why he didn’t call it Alone in the Orient.” Which gave me the luxury of a reply: “Did you watch him inaugurate public health work in the Philippines? Alone in the Orient describes it rather well.”

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I found an atlas and looked up Papua. Rather dully I was informed that Papua lay on the southeastern edge of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world—the Australian Continent’s hottest neighbor, no doubt, since its northern shoulder jogged the equator. The extremely savage names of its numerous tribes, the aimless fertility of its soil, its wealth of gold, copper and pearls, struck only dull fire on my imagination. I was going to a place called Papua, not to flirt with rubber-bellied brunettes in grass skirts, but to search sensibly for yaws, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. And to rout out the hookworm as tamely as I had poked him up in polluted Mississippi.

That was 1918, when a trip to Paris and back was something to talk about. The armistice hadn’t yet sent back a million doughboys with a smattering of obscene French. The world cruise hadn’t risen as a major industry. Today any debutante who has sauntered around the globe can tell you more about Fiji fire-walking and Arabian sword-swallowers than anybody but a professional explorer knew then.

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No, the hereditary Lambert is not a geographer. We are a homebody family, and I often wonder how the colonial Lamberts ever found courage to cross over from England to seventeenth-century New Jersey. They certainly stayed put when they got here; nothing but hunger and Indian raids could budge them. My father, who was a tanner and often used his best leather trying to teach me civility, was looked upon as something of a sea rover because he once drove mules along the Delaware and Hudson Canal towpath. Relatives in Ellenville, New York, where I was born, paled when they learned that Father was moving us to Little Falls.

Our pious Methodists always regarded Father as a freethinker; and wasn’t it like him to want Sylvester to be a doctor? Mr. Babcock, head of our Free Academy in West Winfield, was even more radical. A boy ought to have a college education before he started studying medicine. I had worked with the tannery gang long enough, and had learned too many of the rich, brown oaths they spat out with their chewing tobacco. Hamilton College was the place to smooth me out for medical school. Hamilton College! My mother’s hands went up at the spectral idea of a place so remote that Sylvester would have to go overnight, by train.

I entered with the class of 1903, and the thought of all my father sacrificed to send me there made me a rather earnest student—that, and his threat of more tannery, if I didn’t make good. I am thankful that Hamilton and the Syracuse Medical, which I later attended, were both small, for in small classes the instructor knows the needs and failings of every student. I was a hard worker, but not a grind. I found time for football, which toughened the tannery boy for harder years to come. Trips with the team to rival colleges were early adventures in foreign travel. Colgate, swollen with toothpaste money, was easy fruit for us then. Williams rubbed our noses in the mud to the tune of 4-0—and I wept, limping off the field.

Sometimes in my late middle age I awake from sleep swearing. I have been dreaming of a game with the Carlisle Indians. That big Injun, Red Water, is on the line opposite me, tall as a church, never losing his grin. The ball is snapped and his long arm reaches tenderly over me, gets the seat of my britches....

In 1904 I was prepared for Johns Hopkins, but Mother wanted to know what I’d be doing with myself, ’way over in Maryland. Syracuse was in New York State, anyhow, and that was far enough for anybody.

Syracuse had a faculty disproportionately large and able for so small an enrollment. The ideal of scholarship was Spartan; if a student’s nose roved from the grindstone it was pushed back again. The quizzes were little inquisitions, the recitations no place for a sleepwalker. To study under Elsner, Jacobson and Levy was to appreciate Jewish respect for scholarship. Dr. Steenson, of the Department of Pathology, had a time-keeper’s complex and you missed his eight-thirty bell at your own risk. We called him “Johnnie Cockeye,” for his devotion to the gonococcus germ. I stared through the microscope for interminable hours, seeing but little on the slides. My eyes were already going, but I could read easily. Before I came to class I knew, theoretically, what I was supposed to see under the glass—and that’s how I coped with Steenson’s sudden quizzes.

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The very distinguished Dr. Frank William Marlow, graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, is dead now, but he crowned his career with a book called The Relative Position of Rest of the Eyes. A course under him put my eyesight, quite literally, on the blink. And this is how it came about.

Toward the end of my third year my brother became seriously ill, and I had to take him to Arizona. There I discovered, to my bald astonishment, that this Lambert had a wandering foot. In Tucson I obeyed a mad impulse and joined the crazy medical unit of a construction gang, working down the West Coast of Mexico. I had time to grow romantic when I came to the fine old hacienda of Mr. Eugene Tays, an American mining engineer. The dark eyes of his pretty daughter, Eloisa, melted my every ambition to go home and plug again at a stiff medical course. She was half Spanish, one of the influential Vegas around San Blas; but she had enough Scotch common sense to tell me to go home and graduate. When I had a practice of my own, she said, I could come back and marry her. She had to wait five years, but she kept her promise.

So I went back to Syracuse, weeks behind in my work and facing the final examination in ophthalmology. There were only three days and nights to make up lost time. I had nothing but a photographic memory to help me out. With a shrewdness born of despair I cracked the book at Marlow’s pet subjects. When I finally blinked my way into the classroom I had committed to memory a half-dozen picked pages. I was in luck; iritis, conjunctivitis, glaucoma and myopia were all there to be dealt with. I wrote the answers almost word for word from the pages my mind had photographed. Doctor Marlow was so impressed that he showed my paper around the faculty; it was fairly well decided that I had been cribbing. I might just as well have been, for after a long, tired sleep I found that I had forgotten half the stuff I had crammed. And my eyes were never the same after that ordeal.

No use going so early into the technicalities of my half-ruined sight. Microscopy became all-important to me over twenty-five years of service. I have been very fortunate in the assistants I found or trained to operate the lens for me. With glasses, my middle vision and far vision remained fairly good. And this was fortunate, too, for in my wanderings I have been required to look on many beautiful and horrible things.

Photographic memory-plates are apt to fade rapidly. Several years later, I was admitted to the Costa Rica Medical Faculty, after another feat of intensive cramming. Costa Rican professional standards are high, and not too friendly to Yankee doctors. Though I passed the very severe examination, I am not sure it was my learning that won my degree; my initiation included many cocktails with a great many influential medical officers. Those things help in Central America.

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That was in the calmer period, following four years in Mexico, where I practised medicine between raids by Carranzistas, Villistas, Yaquis. Twice I established myself with my wife and baby on the West Coast, near Eloisa’s home. Twice, because the United States Navy ordered us to escape with our lives, we left the country as refugees.

Those years were heavy with adventure. There was the time when smallpox broke over the helpless people like a cloud of poison gas; I worked alone among hundreds of peons who were anti-vaccinationists to a man and died in their own stench, hidden under dirty clothes. Time and time again I performed emergency amputations on kitchen tables, my Chinese cook giving the anesthetic. I diagnosed malaria on myself, and found my mistake when I came down with a bug of an atypical typhoid group. I lost forty pounds from dysentery and Donna Angela nourished my convalescence with iguana stew. I brought an hysteria-stricken girl back from a state like death by scaring her with a sharp knife. One day I gasped with horror, seeing a native midwife promoting childbirth by tying a woman to high rafters and jerking her legs. One afternoon I barricaded my wife and baby behind sacked beans, and performed a tonsilectomy while the Yaquis broke into a liquor warehouse. Still, there were sweet, mild months under a benevolent Aztec sun; then there came a night when I smelled burning houses and heard the wild-horse squeal of women being raped by Indians.

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One adventure I might record, if briefly. The dreaded Yaquis had joined forces with General Obregón. Colonel Antunez, like a good fellow, was bossing the Indians. They had been letting us alone at Mochis, but danger was always brooding in a place that never knew which side it was on. One day, to my discomfiture, this Colonel Antunez came limping in. He complained of pain in his groin, and a large swelling indicated an operation. He urged me to be quick; he had to be at the front, he was the only man whom Obregón trusted with the wild Yaquis.

When I got in with the knife I found a tumor that extended into the big blood vessels. Removing it was a serious major operation. As soon as he was out from under the anesthetic the war horse snorted again. He must be up and back at the front. I told him that his condition necessitated three weeks of complete rest; he got so excited that his temperature shot up and I had to stop arguing. As he recovered, his officers and their Yaquis were always around.

One morning I found his bed empty. They had smuggled him away in a jolting truck, through a cold rain. He died at Navajoa, of peritonitis or phlebitis, one of the inevitable results.

Next day I was called to the office of His Honor, the Sindico of Mochis, and was surprised by a captain’s tap on my shoulder. I was under arrest. It was a long trip toward the death-house. They jailed me first at Mochis, where I managed to have three words with Meade Lewis, a little red-headed friend of mine who was American consul. I told him what I guessed: I was booked to be shot because one of Obregón’s most valued officers had died after my operation.

My tumbrel to Topolobampo was a track car, bristling with rifles; half the population and their dogs tagged along for a look at the gringo who was going to be tried—which was a synonym for being executed. I had been allowed one glance at Eloisa and our baby. The cell in which I spent ten days was a Yaqui butcher shop when it wasn’t occupied by the condemned. Into a fragrance of spoiled meat my jailor came at last to inform me that the trial and shooting were set for Saturday morning. And here it was Friday.

On Saturday morning I had prepared my sinful Methodist-born soul for a stern hereafter, when the officer in command swung wide the door, saluted deferentially and proclaimed, “Doctor, you are free!”

Not until I had rejoined my family did I learn what this, or anything else, was about. I had become an international affair, they said. Consul Meade Lewis had fairly pulled the cables loose between Topolobampo and Washington. William Jennings Bryan had sent a cruiser down from San Diego. The captain of that cruiser burned the wires to Mexico City with a Richard Harding Davis sort of message: “Release Lambert at once or I’m coming to get him.”

It made a ripping newspaper story. Away up in Newark my brother Fred had been visiting some Mexican friends who told him how wonderfully I was doing in Mochis. After the party Fred passed a subway newsstand and saw the black headline, “JAIL DOOR SWINGS WIDE FOR LAMBERT.” He was proud of the family when he read how William Jennings Bryan had taken steps.

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I have jotted down these few facts about myself so that my readers may try to decide how well experience had equipped me to be an international health physician. I hope they’re not as unsure as I was that day in September, 1918, when I put my family aboard the train for our first long pull toward Papua.