A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER V

SUCH A LITTLE SCHOOL

I don’t think that I am a sentimental man. I shouldn’t be, for my work has not been along sentimental lines, and daily routine should have tried all the sugar out of my system. But when the Mariposa pulled out to sea I seemed to be pulling against it, every inch of the way. The races I had worked among for twenty-one years were not mine. Yet I had a foolish feeling that they were my people. I had been with them so constantly; even during my short leaves in the States they had seldom left my thoughts. A public health physician is no missionary. He does not starve for a Cause. He is well paid for his services, and if he is honest he does his level best to earn his wages. Looking back toward the last dot among the outlying Fijis, I hoped that I had earned my pay.

My older daughter Harriette, who was born in Mexico and whom Eloisa had carried as a baby into every tropical port where we could make another temporary home, was now grown. Sara Celia, born in Fiji, would be nine pretty soon. After all Eloisa had gone through—and she had gone through a great deal, practically and cheerfully—she didn’t look her age, they told me. I was too near-sighted to tell very accurately, but somehow I knew that she didn’t look her age.

My sight had very definitely failed, and that was what caused my retirement in June, 1939. The faulty vision which had bothered me in my student days was now far beyond a point where it could be corrected. I should have retired a year before I did, but one all-important thing held me in Suva—the Central Medical School.

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“Such a tiny little school!” a very great lady had said, wasting a patronizing glance on the small buildings and a knot of students going into class. I had had no time to tell her that this little school had cost one man seventeen years of ambitious planning. Webb Waldron, when he was all too kind to me in his write-up in Harper’s Magazine, had called it “unique in the world’s educational institutions.” He had done me honor overmuch, as Robert Emmet would have put it; but I was vain enough to believe that he had come nearer the truth than the very great lady.

As my days in Suva were coming toward an end my trusted champion the Times and Herald also did me honor overmuch in obituary tones. “Dr. Lambert brought to his work in Fiji, and in other adjacent groups, a personal enthusiasm that seemed to grow the longer he stayed.... He appeared to accept all the health problems of the Pacific as a personal challenge to S. M. Lambert. Many of these problems have either been solved or are in process of solution, and we ... have been given strong reason to hope that the natural problems arising through the contact of white civilization with native races need not necessarily mean the gradual decay of these native races....”

Well, I wasn’t dead yet. Although I had caught some of the diseases I treated, I had recovered. No crocodile had eaten me, no snake or cannibal had done me harm. In all my years down there I had had but one accident: a Ford door closed on one of my fingers, and I lost a nail.

I was still sufficiently alive to wish that I could stay longer and drive home other nails which I had been hammering at for many years. The day before I left, Sir Maynard Hedstrom, who had supported me in everything, pointed to the School and said, “Next you know, Lambert, they’ll be putting up a statue to you.” I said, “I don’t like statues. But if I rate one, I hope it will be of solid brass and show me wearing a pair of wrinkled shorts and carrying an armful of specimen tins. No, in a year or so if anybody says ‘Lambert’ they’ll be asking ‘Who?’ I’m not worrying about a sculptor. What does worry me is the chance of some political thimblerigger coming along to undo everything we’ve done.”

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I spoke with healthy pessimism, and only half-believed my warning. The Central Medical School had been going for a little over ten years, and seemed to have stemmed the tide. It was one of the three pet ideas which Montague and I had hatched back in 1922: a model leper colony at Mokogai, an advanced Medical School for natives, and a Unified Medical Service to cover every island group in the Pacific. Two of these pets thrived and grew to maturity. The Mokogai colony came in with a rush of enthusiasm in 1923, and building began almost at once. The School required seven years of wire-pulling before it began to operate at the beginning of 1929. Up to then there had been but a poor little makeshift, backed by the only funds the Fiji Government could afford.

I have told you of my disappointment in the buildings when the school first opened. The Principal had to run his office in the physiological and chemistry laboratory, which we also used for a classroom; lectures on pathology were about ruined by the horrible overcrowding in the postmortem room, which was a little death trap. The dormitory for men was so inadequate that we had to limit students and hold the scholastic course down to three years.

Then came more ambitious planning, and a long tussle with Bacteriologist John Campbell, who insisted on a pathological laboratory that would cost £5,500 and upward. Dr. Heiser visited us in 1934 and saw our plans for the structure, 70´ × 33´ with floor space for a postmortem theater that would seat the whole student body; this building would be adequate for research work all over the South Pacific, and serve as a teaching institution for our N.M.P.’s. In 1934 the Foundation granted the money for this improvement. On my return from a three weeks survey in New Zealand I had brought back plans, drawn up by their experts, so that we could include a biochemical laboratory in the plant. Dr. Macpherson, our newly acquired bacteriologist, had meanwhile decided with Mr. Campbell that another building must be added and that most of our old equipment must be junked—these items would come to around £2,500 more.

Dr. Heiser had stipulated that the Colony should bear the cost of equipment. Fiji’s wisely economical Chief Medical Officer, Dr. McGusty, thought that £500 would cover everything. Campbell and Macpherson finally convinced him that four times that amount would be needed, and they were right, I thought. I was more or less a referee in this argument between one Irishman and two Scotchmen. But we finally got our beautiful laboratory for research and for practical instruction in preventive medicine.

These facts and figures are just to show, in brief, the time and the effort it cost us all to bring things to anything like a satisfactory conclusion. In 1935 Mr. E. J. Theodore, an Australian mining man, gave £5,000 for a children’s ward in the Hospital. That was a generous gift. But in my absence somebody decided to place the addition right next to our Central Medical School, so near that the noise would interrupt lectures; the idea behind it was to create a nuisance that would compel us to move the School off the Memorial Hospital grounds.... The politicos had been playing with our plan ever since we began building.

It required the long arm of Sir Murchison Fletcher, Fiji’s fair-minded and progressive Governor, to scotch the plot. In 1936, when I went to London to confer with Sir Thomas Stanton, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer, Stanton must have heard from Fletcher, for he asked me if I was satisfied with the location of the children’s ward. I said, “No!” explosively, and Stanton cabled Fletcher not to do anything about that building until I got back and talked to him. Fletcher, aside from being my good friend, was an excellent bridge player and one of the best losers I have ever sat against—a rare virtue in the Colonies where winning any game from the Governor “isn’t done,” or is done at the risk of his friendship. It didn’t take long for Fletcher to settle the matter of that spite-building, and in our favor.

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The third of the schemes which Montague and I had formulated succeeded “in effect” in 1927. That was the Unified Medical Service for the South Pacific. We got another half-loaf there; the other half was lost through Montague’s sense of honor, combined with the hen-minded jealousy of Fiji’s very little Colonial Secretary.

My ruling ambition, all the time I was down there, was to tighten up the loose and scattered medical authority on all the island groups. The only hope was to centralize power, or nothing would ever get done. We had centralized it in the Mokogai leper colony, an unqualified success. We had centralized it more and more in the Medical School, where the same professional education was being given to natives from the four comers of Oceania. Suva had grown to be the South Pacific’s medical center, and the one logical thing was to vest the whole public health authority in Fiji’s Chief Medical Officer.

That seemed simple, for the Colonial Governors were behind us. Then politics came in through the door and common sense flew out of the window. My plan was to put Fiji’s medical chief at the head of this wide service as Central Medical Authority with additional pay of £300—little enough, especially when you take into consideration his increased duties, which would involve personal visits of inspection to all the island groups. The Foundation agreed to pay fifty per cent of this sum for a period of four years.

All set to go. But were we? Dr. Montague’s honor chided him to a decision that he would accept no money that was not paid to him by the Empire that he served. Sir Eyre Hutson, then Governor, agreed that the High Commission Group would pay it all; but Montague objected that he did not deserve the extra stipend, as I would be doing practically all the work. We were stuck on that point. The annual pay of £300, added to Montague’s salary of £1,100, would have been an inducement sufficient to attract an excellent man. But to ask anything like a first-class physician to devote all his time and energy to the Unified Service for £1,000 a year was simply out of the question.

When Montague retired, I raised the question again, and struck an obstacle no larger than a gallstone, and quite as tormenting. It was the little bureaucratic mind of Fiji’s Colonial Secretary, who sat around all day worrying for fear that somebody in the Government would be making a halfpenny more than he did. You know the type. There’s one—at least—in every American county courthouse. Mr. Colonial Secretary sat brooding, “Ha! If that rule goes through, the C.M.O. will be topping my salary!”

Well, it didn’t go through. During my London visit in 1936, I discussed the deadlock with Sir Thomas Stanton. He said, “It’s a splendid idea, and it would take hardly any new machinery to put it over. It has my hearty approval.” But Fiji’s Colonial Secretary belonged to another branch of the service, over which Stanton had no power. Suva’s petty politician held a strategic corner where he could pop a pinch of sand into the wheel. Unfortunately all my suggestions have been pigeonholed.

In 1927 the Unified Medical Service had been voted in—on a small scale. It was devised to control the High Commission groups only; five in all. New Zealand, who had endorsed the idea from the first, was clamoring to come in. But our Colonial Secretary couldn’t see it that way. Somebody would be getting too much power, with the run of all those islands. Therefore New Zealand was out.... All so like a chapter from the history of New York’s Republican Party—or Democratic.

In spite of this I found myself appointed to the sonorous position of Deputy Central Medical Authority, under the Chief Medical Officer as Central Medical Authority, who controlled the health work of the five groups. As he had never visited all these groups, and I had, I was kept quite busy as his adviser. In 1934 the Medical Authority went into fuller effect, so that the Chief could make the rounds and study conditions at first hand. The other day Dr. McGusty, now Chief Medical Officer, wrote me that these visits had become a part of his routine.

Here is something from my files. It is headlined “Memorandum for Dr. McGusty.”

Based on personal experience with administrations in the South Seas since 1916, I regret to record that nowhere in the world have I found so large a percentage of doctors who discredited the medical profession and the various governments that employed them. Poor organization is another important factor.... I have been greatly interested in the efforts of (Governor) Sir Murchison Fletcher to bring about more effective aid. The plan to amalgamate the medical services of Tonga, Gilbert and Ellices, Samoa and other groups with Fiji is an important step to make the service more attractive and draw to it the type of man and woman who may be counted upon to bring about a vast improvement....

This document, in its original, was signed, “Victor G. Heiser.” When last heard of, however, the local Colonial Secretary was still pouring sand into the dynamo.

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Facts, figures, politics—those were all long rows to hoe. Now back to my School—I still call it mine, although it has passed into other hands. When you watch young people grow in body and intelligence you seem to grow with them. Despite my work in other fields, I was very close to them all for ten years, marking their improvement and their deficiencies. We had to make allowances for the first batch that came to us when we opened for business; they had been sent rather helter-skelter, but did surprisingly well under the circumstances. Because there were far more applicants than we could handle, we stiffened the entrance examinations all along the line. No more sentimentality in the choosing, and no political favoritism. We opened with forty boys, but with increased accommodations we soon had fifty. When we considered taking care of sixty there was a nervous murmur in Suva: “Pretty soon we’ll be overrun with N.M.P.’s and not need the School any more.” That was ridiculous, for the increase in graduates was far behind Fiji’s increase in population. Not to mention the needs of other island groups, clamoring for more places. I was always afraid that the School would be voted out of existence, for some unreasonable reason like the one I have mentioned.

Australia never sent any students from Papua or New Guinea; they still maintained that these natives were too “backward.” I had worked in the jungle with Papuan and New Guinea boys, and I knew that they were no more backward than the inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and New Hebrides, who were represented with us from the first. I still feel that Australia, with her tremendous problem, will never make any progress with native health until she establishes some institution similar to the one in Suva—which is out of the question now, because they haven’t the proper set-up. Sydney has an admirable school of tropical medicine and hygiene—for whites. It lacks both the clinical material and the stuff to cope with natives, and native conditions. Once in a great while this school will take in a black boy, merely to exhibit him as a curiosity.

Perhaps I am a co-educationalist; I have never settled that point with myself. But I feel very sure that no race advances very far unless its women advance with it. On the strength of that theory I made every effort to improve the condition of native student nurses. When the European nurses of the War Memorial moved to larger quarters I was glad to see the native girls housed in the abandoned building, a great improvement on what they had had.

Steps had been taken toward their advanced education. Before admission the young girls were given a course in the Methodist mission school, largely to teach them the rudiments of English. A Rockefeller Foundation fellowship sent a European nurse to the States to educate her in the modern theory and practice of training nurses. She returned in 1940 to open a school for native nurses, which would synchronize theoretical instruction with practical work in the hospital. Thus they would attain as high a rating in their profession as the N.M.P.’s in theirs. In outlying Fijian districts it was the policy to send out two native nurses with each N.M.P., to take care of two very important items: infant welfare and obstetrical cases.

I was pleased by the many marriages of these young women and our practitioners; they were usually happy. I fondly believed that two equal minds, mated in a common interest, would have all the advantages from the start. I was seldom disappointed. In the field the young wife was her husband’s busy partner. If she retired to her village to settle down and have babies, she brought modern methods into her neighborhood.

For many of the boys the English language was a stumbling block, especially at first. The Polynesian students both spoke and wrote it well; New Zealand had taken care of that. But the Melanesians were another matter; during the first years of the School they came to us with nothing better than a smattering of English. We corrected that in time by requiring a preliminary course in English for all candidates. Even then they were handicapped, and it was interesting to see the Melanesian patience with which they slowly struggled through the mystery of our grammar, until they could rival their Polynesian classmates.

As underclassmen the boys from the Cooks and Samoa, to whom English was a second language, worked on the inferiority complex of Fijians and Solomon Islanders. Then as years went on, we watched the Melanesian lads begin to pull up. No, sir, they weren’t going to let a lot of blithering Polynesians beat them at any game. They pored over books, they wrote reams, they spoke English among themselves and corrected one another’s compositions. Sir Maynard Hedstrom was offering a senior year gold medal for excellence in Public Health studies. The Polynesians were bright enough to win it more often than not, but as upperclassmen they had to put up a lively fight to outdo the Melanesians. The earnest and industrious black fellows clawed their way to the top, every hour of that four-year course.

Here’s a classroom scene, picturing the competitive spirit:—

[Numa, a Cook Islander, is pointing at a skeleton and asking questions. He addresses Daniele, from the New Hebrides. Daniele is blue black, but not negroid. His eyes are circled with white and his white teeth glisten as he tries to concentrate on something he knows perfectly well, but can’t express in English. Or if he can express it, it will come hard. He has to mine it out. Daniele is the one I liked to put on the front seat and rag, knowing that he would agonize over the answer, but would finally get it right.

Numa: How many bones in the human hand?

Daniele: Eight. (After an inner struggle.)

Numa: Right! (Daniele shows a thousand dollars’ worth of perfect teeth.)

[Numa turns to Mu, who is not very bright for a Samoan.

Numa: What bones are affected by a Colles’s fracture?

[Mu groans and hesitates. He won’t give up, but Numa is tired of waiting, so he passes it to Tatoa, a dark, chunky Gilbertese who usually knows the answer.

Tatoa: The radius ulna.

[Sounds of approval from the whole class, and a rather shocked expression because Mu knows so little.

As an example of the steady, capable Fijian mind I think I should select Sowani, born a chief and mentally so well endowed that he became probably the outstanding one of the old School’s graduates. He served in the Gilbert and Ellices for some thirty years, and had been stationed there for a long time when I first met him. European doctors might come and go, but most of the Europeans wanted Sowani when they were sick. During the First World War he was made Acting Senior Medical Officer, the highest medical position in the Group. The Government appreciated his services by giving him a salary and allowance which permitted him a European standard of living. About the time I left Fiji he retired on a pension and was decorated by the King, quite a distinction for a native boy. When I made my survey he had completed his 20,000th operation for glands in the neck; his surgery was beautiful. Incoming Senior Medical Officers in the G. & E. were squeamish about being successors to the dark-skinned Practitioner. When patients called for him in preference to the white doctors, poor Sowani would remain the pattern of etiquette. “Mr. So-and-So had called for you, Doctor,” he would say; but when the white physician called, the patient was disappointed. One candid and sick Australian said, “Get out, you Son of Something! It’s Sowani I want.” Sowani was always to be counted on. He was a Fijian.

When I looked over the classes in our growing school, with no intent to play favorites—for I think I know the contrasting virtues of these two fine races—I could not help but see that in practical application the Fijian was far superior to the Samoan and the Cook Islander. The latter were brilliant in theory, but set a Fijian to reasoning a thing out for himself and his conclusions were more apt to be right, for the slow logic of his mind was almost Scottish. Principal Clunie and I watched the work of one plum-colored Fijian named Ravuki. Ravuki wasn’t worth his salt, at first, and was too lazy to put on his own lavalava. But in his senior year he developed a burst of speed that was quite astonishing. He fairly shone in the preventive medicine course. He blazed his way forward at such a pace that he threatened the performance of Alo, a Tongan boy who had been the School’s wonder and had walked away with all the prizes. In the final examination Ravuki seemed to have the edge on Alo. I was afraid that my affection for Fiji had biased my judgment, so I ordered a second examination and called in two European physicians to sit with me as referees. This time the Fiji boy was so good that he was still talking when the two other judges made up their minds that he had won hands down.

Ravuki became one of our most successful N.M.P.’s, and like most Fijians, almost tragically conscientious. Right after graduation he was sent out to the jungle to control a typhoid epidemic. In his work our prize pupil picked up a typhoid germ—and was so ashamed of it that he refused to visit the School, all the time I was there.

His upper-class rival, Alo, had a much more romantic story when he went into practice. Principal Clunie—and a “damn good man” as we say unofficially—was something of a prize winner himself. He started with the rank of tutor, and before he was through with it Australia gave him a gold medal for his work among native races. Well, if I unconsciously played favorites with Ravuki, Clunie was much inclined toward Alo, and had such faith in his ability that he gave him special favors in surgery. Alo got to be as good a surgeon as you could ask for anywhere.

He was so capable that the C.M.O. of Tonga let him do surgery there. When Alo was put in charge of the Haapai group, the medico of the Vavau group was much annoyed, for all his surgical work began going to Haapai. The young Practitioner had set eyes on a pretty girl of a noble Haapai family, and was in despair because his sweetheart’s parents objected to his humble lineage. All the traders and other Europeans were in sympathy with the Romeo and Juliet situation, and from one of the sympathizers Alo borrowed a sea-going launch and filled it with gas. This was on Sunday night when all good Christians were at church. Very conveniently the girl stepped out of church and into the boat. When her family came out to give chase they found that all the launches in the dock were out of commission. Somebody had drained off the gas and crippled the engines.

The job of selecting boys for our School was never an easy one. Different races and different environment had to be taken into consideration. In Fiji we advertised for candidates, and the competitive examinations included the three R’s, plus a certain knowledge of English. We had to compromise between the over-young and the over-old. Boys from fifteen to sixteen would graduate too young. Those of twenty had been out of school too long. In the matter of sending incompetents, I had to visit several island groups and lecture the Europeans on their duty to keep up the standard. This brought about the rigid tests we required, and with satisfactory results. Two visiting English medical professors pleased me by saying that our boys in daily recitation compared favorably with students of the same grade in the University of London’s Medical School.

The matter of habit and custom had to be attended to. We had to treat them all as equals, and strike some common denominator. The lads from the Solomon Islands and New Hebrides—before well educated half-castes came to us—had never eaten off a table or sat in a chair. Their milieu was the floor. To give them credit in the eyes of the sophisticated Polynesians we must teach them certain rudimentary table manners. The Samoan and Cook Island boys, on the other hand, often showed up at the Grand Pacific Hotel’s dances in tail coats and stiff shirts.

This was something of a situation, in the School’s first years. Our Polynesians weren’t quite at ease with their low-browed associates. Then, to their credit, they began to see what it was all about, and things straightened out to a generally loyal corps spirit. We saw the danger of over-Europeanizing them; for they must not return to their homes and be discontented with island ways. We always put more stress on cleanly, sanitary habits than “fussy fixin’s” like tablecloths. Some of our students who had been too Europeanized by New Zealand before they came did not turn out so well. They knew so much already that they saw no necessity to work for what they got. It was another case of the hare and the tortoise; or, more properly, the hare became the tortoise and loafed on the job.

There was one of our Cook Islanders whose scholastic record was so unusual that the Administration there wanted to send him to London to complete his education, until I seriously objected. Such a precedent would fill the School with jealous discontent. The Cook Islands, I found later, had spoiled the boy so badly that he acquired vicious habits. He had enough character to reform himself, but not until his Practitionership was taken away from him.

His was an exceptional case.

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My volunteer marriage bureau for Practitioners and native nurses became an unqualified success. In Fiji the quality of nurses was improving all the time, and before long an especially pretty one was a marked girl the minute she got her diploma. There have been many such marriages, and there would be still more if it were not for the native missionaries, who are cutting ahead of our boys. In Samoa, where the New Zealand system turns out Polynesian nurses who are sweet as sugar and smart as chain lightning, it is almost taken for granted that an N.M.P. will lead one to the altar, or make a brave try at it.

A cross-eyed Samoan named Tongamau, one of our brightest and best, married a native nurse. Both he and his young wife had specialized on infant feeding, so after the baby was born and had attained a few months’ growth Tongamau took him off breast-feeding and decided to bring him up entirely on native food. On that basis the Tongamaus worked out a whole formula of infant diet and composed careful instructions for preparing the ingredients, the change and weight of meals from week to week, and so on. Tongamau’s account of this successful experiment was first printed in our school publication The Native Medical Practitioner and was widely reviewed in standard medical journals.

N.M.P. Okeseni also married a native nurse, and his article in the same publication reveals another Practitioner’s cleverness in the use of materials at hand. (Okeseni, by the way, is the Samoan pronunciation of “oxygen.”) Okeseni’s essay is entitled “Coconut Fiber Used in Ligatures,” and says, “... I was thinking ... that the fibers of the husk could be used instead of silkworm gut; for they are protected from any outside contamination....” He employed them successfully in many operations.

Any copy of the Practitioner is worth looking over for interesting articles, written in businesslike professional English. “General Practice in Native Villages of Fiji,” by N.M.P. Ieni; “Foodstuffs in the Gilbert Islands,” by Third-Year Student Arobati Hicking; and there’s one called “Medical Work on Rennell Island” by N.M.P. Hughie Wheatley which I especially remember. He is the half-caste son of Norman Wheatley, the yacht-collector; and Hughie’s article tells how he adopted a four-months-old Rennellese baby whose mother was too feeble to nurse it; he saved the child with a diet of native food, somewhat after Tongamau’s formula.

I have watched the lives of all my boys, going out into the world. There was Tau Cowan, a half-British Cook Islander who married out of his profession. The girl he picked was a daughter of the King of Rarotonga; she had been beautifully educated in New Zealand, and has made him a good wife; Tau has become one of our outstanding graduates.

John Numa, on the other hand, found his wife in an insane asylum. She was far from crazy; in fact she was the native warder’s daughter. It was the warder’s reason that was endangered, for John’s courtship was so hot and heavy that I was called in, and a minister was immediately summoned. Some of the whites wanted to make a scandal out of John’s behavior—which was not scandalous according to the native code—but the couple went to the Cooks, where Mrs. Numa was a great social hit and became the successful rival of a lady who had long ruled the roost, a half-caste official wife. John Numa made an outstanding survey of the leper situation on Penrhyn.

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We went in for athletics, of course, and a school band. Ielu Kuresa, a Samoan, organized the band, and as he conducted the popular tunes his pale scholar’s face was filled with the spiritual earnestness that finally led him to his death. Mesalume, the husky Fijian, was a Lau boy, and a contrast in character. We taught him to box, and when he was matched with Helu, a Tongan about twice his size, Mesalume put him out in the third round with a stiff one on the chin. This Fijian was a natural athlete, and the mainstay of our football team.

Ielu and Mesalume—contrasting types of contrasting races, they met the same end in the line of duty.

I have a sort of father’s affection for the natives of all the groups, but my admiration always turns back to the Fijian, a tower of strength, who never lets you down when you need him. I have seen so many of them go out into the field and do far more than their share, far better than their competitors,—dignified, ethical medical men.

Mesalume had great force of character, and an intellectual independence. Once I had to intervene when he got into an argument with an Australian nurse in the War Memorial. The delicate point was that Mesalume was right, but a colored boy was not supposed to have an opinion of his own. It took diplomacy to get him out of that mess. His reaction was very Scottish. “I still think so,” he told me in confidence.

Early in the School’s career we organized their teams, intramural affairs. True, it was not American football, but the more open Rugby. With the gusto of old gridiron experience, I saw that their play could be just as rough as ours. Men like Mesalume played for the glory of Fiji, for the Fijian is “unco’ proud” of his strength and skill. The only disharmony that ever arose in the Medical School was when the boys were choosing players; the Polynesians all ganged up against the Fijians, and vice versa, most definitely. When we crystallized into a unit we played against the Police Team, the Agricultural Department and about six other organizations. The pick of our boys got the “shield,” and some were chosen for the much coveted All Fiji Team. The chosen ones were Fijians, with no exception. And Mesalume, of course, was one of them.

In a series of inter-island battles the All Fijis met the famous New Zealand Maoris, who had bowled over about everything they had met, wherever Rugby was played. When Fiji met Maori it was a different story, “all blood and guts,” as an Australian critic expressed it. Our native boys had the advantage because they could kick barefoot—wonderful, how they could do it. They would come on the field in the regulation Rugby uniform, but after the first scrimmage the air would be full of shoes and stockings—the Fijians were rushing into battle as their cannibal grandsires did, with naked toes and tiger hearts. Then larger objects would come soaring out of the huddle; the bodies of Maoris, falling with a deadly plunk. In reprisal the flying Maoris would come back with a thud that was like a convulsion of nature. Their convulsion was more deadly in the last game of one series. We of Fiji were small-minded enough to say, “Well, let ’em have it this time. The officials were all New Zealanders, and they couldn’t let their champions go home again with nothing to show for it.”

Pride of race takes some queer turns. The one Negro in Fiji was a coal-black American who said, “Yassa, I was de first white man on the Mba River.” Pride of race was rampant in Peti, one of our Samoans, who never failed to boast of his American blood. His grandfather was a Negro sailor. On the strength of this distinction he won the hand of a well-born Fijian half-caste and took her back to Samoa. He was another one who did great credit to the School.

Our Fijian N.M.P. Eroni came from Lau, where the people are fair-skinned as Polynesians. When he worked alone on Rennell it was quite understandable that he should have gained the reputation of being the first “white man” who had penetrated half the island. Eroni’s success among white residents of the Solomons was so great that one lady wrote to a Sydney paper to thank him for saving her life and her sister’s. Such achievements are a commonplace in Fiji; Britishers in the back country argue about the attainments of an N.M.P. as we people at home discuss the family doctor.

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One of these days, a Fijian basso will sing Otello’s role in the Metropolitan Opera House. If you have ever heard their deep, true voices you will agree with me. And if you have ever watched the action of their mighty thews on the playing field, you may well believe that a world’s heavyweight champion will also emerge from one of these dark islands. So far, however, they have much to learn. I read of one who went to London to meet a middleweight; but since the sports columns are not featuring him, I think he may not have done so well.

There is a gigantic fellow named Ratu Mbola who has degenerated into a half-Europeanized show-off, and throws out his chest when the boats come in in hopes that somebody will buy him a drink. To distinguish himself from the common herd he wears golf socks, and tennis shoes, and carries a fly-brush over his shoulder. “Bar Fly” is the name both he and his brush have earned.

In days gone by when Jack Johnson became champion of the world by defeating Tommy Burns in Australia there was rejoicing in every Fijian village. “One of our race has conquered!” was the cry. At that time Ratu Mbola was in his prime, a muscular chief of Mbau. On the way home from his defeat Tommy Burns stopped off at Suva and the hushed word went through the villages, “He’s running away from the black man who beat him!” So Ratu Mbola came forth as a local black hope, and challenged Mr. Burns. The evening of the fight the arena was packed with natives who thronged in to see a white man crumple under a volley of Fijian blows. But somehow Tommy didn’t crumple. He played cat and mouse for two rounds, pretending to be groggy from Mbola’s blows. In the first minute of the third he got tired of making false passes and floored Mbola with one heartbreaking uppercut. The referee did not render a decision. He didn’t have a chance. Mbola went through the ropes on all fours, and when next seen was running down the street, waving his boxing gloves.

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All of this was quite unfair to the Fijian. It was like taking him to the piano and asking him to play a Bach fugue. Mesalume, as an athlete and professional man, was of a quite different pattern. We sent him to the New Hebrides, a field that would try the soul of any man. His reports came in; he was administering medicine in feverish jungles that had been beyond the reach of government officials. He was treating thousands for every disease under the tropical sun. Mr. Paton, always the stanch friend of my N.M.P.’s, took him in when he could and worried because the boy was so overworked.

Suddenly Mesalume’s reports stopped coming in. What had happened to him? Then a letter from Mr. Paton:—

... Mr. Siller, an Austrian, at South West Bay, Malekula, had blackwater fever. Dr. Mesalume treated him, and thought that he was on the mend. But Mr. Siller died next day. Dr. Mesalume contracted blackwater fever. Mr. Corlette was most kindly and attentive, but Dr. M. died. We are all deeply grieved. He was always so willing and keen to help.... I remember what pride he had in his Medical College, and I think that he would have increased its usefulness.... He earned the respect of the natives, so that the nearest village of Tatau had made a yam garden for him, without pay....

I went to the New Hebrides and found the place where he had died on duty, in a remote corner of the jungle. Mesalume, like all the men of Lau, had a passionate love of home, and this was so far away, so completely lonely.... Wild black faces had stared in at the window, wondering what he was saying in his delirious ramblings. Blackwater fever might have killed him; nobody really knew. I did the sentimental thing, I suppose, when I asked the Condominium Government to mark his grave. They put up a handsome concrete block with some of his history on it and the epitaph, “He Died in a Foreign Country.” Yes, he had given the best he had to save life, and when his time came he had died the death of a lonely dog. I had always thought that something like that would happen to me. But, God, here I am!

After this death we could have got a dozen to go up there and take his place. That’s the Fijian for you.

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Ielu, his Samoan classmate, was another story, just as tragic. When he died on duty Dr. Heiser said it was one of the greatest losses imaginable for the Pacific. Ielu had worked for his own people with the fiery zeal of a priest. Through all his training in the Medical School he sweated his way upward with one ambition: to go home and bring help to his own Samoans. His tall, slender figure was forever bending over books, his luminous brown eyes drinking in the useful facts that would contribute to his future. He was monastic in his self-effacement. He should have been a lonely type, but underneath his detachment there was a warmth which made him popular with his classmates, and he became a leader in student activities.

Well, he went back to Samoa, and I was a bit nervous about what might happen to him. The Mau Rebellion was in full swing, and with his zealous temperament I was afraid that he would be in it up to the ears. Instead of that, he became the bellwether that kept the sane ones in line. He was there as a doctor, and never for a moment did he forget his duty to the Medical Administration. I have one vivid memory of Ielu in action. It was on a Samoan back porch, none too roomy at best, and the patient’s relatives were crowded around the table with the usual prayers and palaver. Dr. Hunt, the C.M.O., was with me to watch the operation, which was for an elephantoid scrotum. With people threatening to jog his elbow, with relatives yammering in his ear, Ielu handled his instruments with concentrated exactitude. When it was over and Ielu was washing up, Dr. Hunt said softly, “I wish I could get as good a job as that in the Apia Hospital.”

In March, 1936, an epidemic of influenza broke out in Upolu and Ielu came down with it. He was always working on the hairline of his strength; and with the emergency of the epidemic he was called from his sickbed to give aid. He put in days of long hours before his exhausted heart gave out. He died in Dr. Pat Monaghan’s arms. The Samoan obituaries did not need to tell me that they had lost a surgeon who was on his way to greatness. A Samoan student, writing about him in our Native Medical Practitioner, told the simple truth when he said, “He died in harness.... He was kind to the human race and all loved him.” The Samoan Administration established the Ielu Kuresa Gold Medal in his memory, and generously marked it For the best Fijian of the year. That was their gratitude to us for giving them Ielu.

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The passing of these brave and devoted men still touches me so deeply that I seldom speak of them. Another one who died is still more tragic to me, for that death was not so long ago. Last summer a letter from Fiji came to me at my California home. It was from Malakai and told me that Vakatawa, who had been my assistant, had committed suicide. I couldn’t understand it. Vakatawa had stood like a rock and worked like a hero in every assignment I had given him. An expert on tuberculosis, he had examined all the chests in the Colos, and his reports were works of art in their scientific accuracy. He had his sense of humor, too. Once I sent him on a survey over a far corner of Viti Levu, and he came back with nothing but a tattered lavalava and his boxes of equipment. It turned out that a fishing party from Mbengga had met him on the coast and stripped him of every rag he had on; they gutted his suitcases, relieved him of five pounds cash, left him naked on the beach. Pretty rough work, but it was an old-time custom when the people of Mbengga met the people of Lau, and vice versa. Vakatawa had fought so hard for his microscope and other scientific items that they decided to let him keep them. Quite unembittered, he had borrowed a lavalava and come home smiling. When I said, “I guess I’ll go out and survey Mbengga myself,” Vakatawa chuckled, “Better not, Doctor. They’ll strip you too, because you’re with me.”

Those who knew him well said of Vakatawa, “He has the mind of a first-class white man.” That remark was a bit patronizing, but it expressed the general confidence in him. He had gone very deeply into the study of magic, and to his reports I owe a great deal of what I learned about draunikau and the ritual of the seven curses.[7]

Did Vakatawa end his life as the result of some magic wish? That was out of the question. Time and again, he had outfaced the witch doctors with practical lessons in modern medicine, and he was too well-loved among the villages for anybody to put a curse on him. I have looked into Vakatawa’s case as best I could from where I sit and where he lies, and I think I know the reason why he locked himself in his room and put a razor blade across his wrists. Always a sensitive man, he had a sensitive man’s high temper, which his racial courtesy seldom allowed to get the better of him. But that hot temper got him into some sort of brawl, and after it was over he felt that he had disgraced himself and had not lived up to his responsibilities as a Practitioner. He was inordinately proud of his profession, and when his brooding mind told him that he had let the School down, he decided that there was no use living any longer.

I give Vakatawa an honored place among those who died in the line of duty.

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Our little School has grown, and is growing. My constant hope is that its roots have gone so deep into the soil of Fiji that no political whim or Anglo-Saxon prejudice shall ever blast it in some clumsy attempt at transplanting. Already we have sent out well over a hundred competent medical men; not many, perhaps, in the millions of ocean miles which their work must cover. But their efficiency shows in the general improvement in health wherever they have operated.

To the outsider it may seem a bit incredible that the descendants of cannibals—and the majority of them are just that—should be devoting their young talents to saving life, where their ancestors were bent on destroying it. But to me the protean change is a very logical thing. The cannibals were anatomists, and their gruesome habits made them familiar with the set-up of the human body. Just as Roman surgeons studied the victims dragged from the arena, so the wiser of the anthropophagi observed and learned. Neither ways were pretty roads to knowledge, but strange things have happened in the Martyrdom of Man.

As I lectured the students in the postmortem theater I often paused in interest at the skill of this one and that, plying the knife. No one of them had ever seen cannibalism in practice; but ancestral voices, turned friendly and benevolent, seemed to be telling them what to do.

I have a photograph which I took down in Santa Ana, Solomon Islands. It is of a brown woman, practically nude, with shark’s teeth around her neck and a long clam-hinge sticking through her nose. I think I’ve told you how I took this picture of Mrs. Kuper, the trader’s wife. She was holding up one small, naked boy, and another stood at her side. I have another picture; it is of a good-looking boy, very collegiate in a tweed suit and striped necktie. He would be hard to recognize as the naked child in the first picture.

Geoffrey Kuper’s father was sufficiently well-to-do to send him for study in New Zealand. He graduated from our Central Medical, class of ’38, and Sydney gave him a prize “for the most distinguished scholar of the year.” Before he took up his duties as N.M.P. in the Solomons, he dropped in on his old school-friends in Auckland. A reporter got hold of him and Geoffrey told of the first scholastic prize he ever received, an honorary belt which his mother’s tribe gave him as an introduction to manhood. It was a hard initiation. For six months he had stayed in the ceremonial house, among the ancestral canoes and family skulls. Priests came to his pagan retreat to instruct him in tribal duties, which included house-building and the preparing of a yam and dalo garden.

Then he was put in a fishing canoe where the priests angled until they caught a great bonito. It was the boy’s task to wrestle with the fish and hold it until it ceased to flap. Boy and fish were taken to the pagan altar where priests squeezed the bonito’s gills and let drops of blood fall into the initiate’s mouth. At the end of the long ceremony Geoffrey was taken to a high tower and allowed to throw food down to the admiring populace. “That part was fun,” he said.

A graduate Practitioner, Geoffrey had been away from his mother’s tribe so long that he had forgotten her inherited language. But his father, a very progressive European, wanted his son to have the best of our civilization. He was right, I think, for Geoffrey is doing fine work in the Solomons.