In 1892 I found the wife of a very dear Spanish friend dying from an ailment which in the United States could have been promptly and certainly remedied by a surgical operation. I begged him to take her to Manila, telling him of the ease with which any fairly good surgeon would relieve her, and promising to interest myself in her case on my arrival there. To my utter amazement I found that there was not a surgeon in the Philippine Islands who would venture to open the human abdomen. The one man who had sometimes done this in Spain stated that it would be impossible for him to undertake it in Manila, on account of the lack of a suitable operating room, of instruments and of the necessary anaesthetist and other professional assistants. In fact, at the time of the American occupation there was not a modern operating room, much less a modern hospital, in the Philippines. Thousands upon thousands of people were perishing needlessly every year for the lack of surgical intervention. A common procedure in dealing with wounds was to cover them with poultices of chewed tobacco, ashes, and leaves.
In many provinces the people were without medical assistance of any sort, and fell into the hands of native quacks who were little, if at all, better than witch doctors.
The most fantastic views were entertained relative to the causation of disease. In some towns it was vigorously asserted that after a peculiar looking black dog ran down the street cholera appeared. In other places cholera was generally ascribed to the poisoning of wells by Spaniards or foreigners.
Cemeteries were not infrequently situated in the very midst of towns, or near the local supplies of drinking water. Conditions within their walls were often shocking from an aesthetic view point. As the area available for burials was limited, and the graves were usually unmarked, parts of decomposed bodies were constantly being dug up. It was the custom to throw such remains about the foot of the cross at the centre of the cemetery.
Military sanitation was also very bad. I was at Zamboanga when the wreck of General Weyler’s expedition to Lake Lanoa began to return. There had been no adequate provision for the medical care of the force in the field, and the condition of many of the soldiers was pitiable in the extreme. Disabled men were brought in by the shipload, and the hospitals at Zamboanga, Isabela de Basilan and Joló were soon filled to overflowing.
The lack of adequate sanitary measures was equally in evidence in dealing with cattle disease. Rinderpest, a highly contagious and very destructive disease of horned cattle, was introduced in 1888 and spread like fire in prairie grass. No real effort was made to check it prior to the American occupation, and it caused enormous losses, both directly by killing large numbers of beef cattle and indirectly by depriving farmers of draft animals.
When I first visited the islands every member of our party fell ill within a few weeks. All of us suffered intensely from tropical ulcers. Two had malaria; one had dysentery; one, acute inflammation of the liver, possibly of amoebic origin; and so on to the end of the chapter. I myself got so loaded up with malaria in Mindoro that it took me fifteen years to get rid of it.
Fortunately the American army of occupation brought with it numerous competent physicians and surgeons, and abundant hospital equipment and supplies, for the soldiers promptly contracted about all the different ailments to be acquired in the islands.
When I arrived in Manila on the 5th of March, 1899, I found that a great army hospital, called the “First Reserve,” had been established in the old rice market. There was another sizable one on the Bagumbayan drive. A third occupied a large building belonging to French sisters of charity which was ordinarily used for school purposes.
In immediate connection with the First Reserve Hospital was a tent hospital where sick and wounded Insurgents were being given the best of care.