And Vancouver brought the bloody flux, which in a few months killed a great number of them.... To any man of humanity, nothing can be more distressing than to cast his eye on the island of Otaheite, a spot blessed by nature with everything that can make life pleasing ... but now become a scene of general mortality, and a prey to disease, which to all human appearance, will in a few years render it a desolate wilderness.
But when you run a thumb over Mariner’s Tonga Islands you are forced to believe that the old cures were sometimes super-Spartan, although the savage doctors recognized tetanus long before the discovery of bacteria. Says Mariner:—
In all cases of considerable wounds produced by pointed instruments the patient is not allowed to wash himself until he is tolerably well recovered, nor to shave, cut his hair, nor his nails; for all these things are supposed to produce gita (tetanus).
Mariner reported that convalescents “happening to wash themselves too soon, spasms supervened, and death was the consequence.” Observers told him that “wounds in the extremities ... are liable to produce tetanus.... They never allow females to be near men thus wounded, lest the mere stimulus of venereal desire should induce this dangerous complaint....” One man was “eight months without being washed, shaved or having his hair or nails cut....”
Now for the old treatment of tetanus, an art they learned from Fiji, where warlike habits made gita very common.
... consists in the operation of tocolo’si, or passing a reed first wetted with saliva into the urethra, so as to occasion a considerable irritation and loss of blood; and if the general spasm is violent, they make a seton of this passage, by passing down a double thread, looped over the end of the reed, and when it is felt in the perineum they cut down upon it, seize hold of the thread ... the thread is occasionally drawn backwards and forwards, which excites great pain, and an abundant discharge of blood....
Several times Mariner saw this cruel operation; the jaws, he said, were violently closed for a few seconds, but lockjaw never developed. The recoveries, he thought, were about forty per cent. They also let blood in this way for ridiculous reasons, like wounds in the abdomen; but they had a theory (rather in line with some of our advanced scientists) that passing a reed into the urethra had a rejuvenating effect on the debilitated. The King of Tonga, in Mariner’s time, had this operation performed “and two or three days later he felt himself quite light, and full of spirits.”
The operation called boca was castration in cases of enlarged testicles (probably elephantiasis). Tourniquets were skillfully made of native cloth and the instruments were razor-edges of split bamboo. Dr. Martin wrote:—
A profuse hemorrhage is mostly the consequence of this operation; it was performed seven times within the sphere of Mr. Mariner’s knowledge ... to three of which he was witness. Not one of the seven died....
Sounds gory enough, doesn’t it? But those native sorcerers, working with tapa and banana-leaf bandages, cutting with split bamboo, displayed an art and a knowledge of surgery which had been cultivated through generations of experience. This wasn’t just voodoo. It was applied surgery, practised by men who needed only the touch of modern science to equip them for the great work.