Before I left Suva for the 1925 survey Dr. Maurice C. Hall had requested me to try his latest discovery, tetrachlorethylene, on hookworm patients. I was the first to use it. Malakai and I selected a number of patients at the Residency at Vila, treated them, counted the worms, then re-treated them to see the percentage of efficiency. Results were splendid, and physical reactions to the drug were few.
Later on a shipping strike in Sydney stranded us at Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, and there I was able to make a field test to determine how well tetrachlorethylene would work if given by laymen. On the fine Matevan Plantation I examined 102 laborers and found 97 infected with the Necator. We were working all over the island, so we had to move into the interior, but before I left Matevan I gave Fleming, the planter, a supply of the new drug with instructions as to dosage. Malakai and I got back in two weeks; again I rounded up my 97 patients, and was delighted to find that only 16 of them were even lightly infected with the worm. When I considered that the work had not been done by medical men, the results were very gratifying.
On this Matevan plantation I found that filariasis was so general that one force of 69 field hands had lost a total of 34 days in the past month. No wonder the French were importing Indo-Chinese. But a bad compromise.... The natives seemed to enjoy it when we took blood smears and let them peer through the lens at swimming microfilariae. “Snakes in the blood!” they shouted admiringly. Back in the bush villages, when we were making hookworm tests, the old snake-in-belly argument always worked. What worked still better was the growing opinion that our medicine was some sort of booze. Results were often disconcerting. With thirty Big Nambas milling around, flourishing guns and shouting praise to Tamaz, it was up to your director to sit very tight and remember what the Government had said: Use tact.
Hookworm lectures in the villages, when we could drum up an audience, never lacked the element of surprise. One day we expected a fair number of natives but nobody showed up. Then a shy pagan sauntered in and explained that they couldn’t come today “because an old man had to hang himself.” We set out with police and missionaries, but the party was over when we arrived. The old man had had all his pigs slaughtered and given the neighbors a splendid feast. In the flush of revelry he had gone into the house, put a noose around his neck and thrown the end out of a window. His friends had obligingly pulled the string, then gone on with the free feed, vowing that he was a nice, generous fellow, but too old to be much good.
In the back country the old and feeble were often buried alive. A Catholic priest told me how he had started his congregation. He dug up an antiquated couple who had just been dug in, revived them, baptized them and gained two splendid converts.
On Santo I saw one man who had been arrested for planting his father in a deep hole. This patricide was just as puzzled as the Malekula fellow who had buried his newborn child.
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As a divertissement in pandemonium we had on our hands Dr. P. T. Buxton of the London School of Tropical Medicine. A distinguished scholar, Buxton was often a thorn in the side because of his definitely pro-Buxton opinions. I first met him in Samoa where he was patronizing New Zealand’s great medical work, then London sent him with us to the New Hebrides. Before our boat touched land he endeared himself to his fellow passengers by remarking, “Aren’t colonials quare people!” At a tea party in Vila his hostess asked, “Which of the Colonies do you come from, Doctor?” Buxton’s eyebrows went up. “I only come from England!”
Malakai, who had been busy as a bird dog, was guardedly polite to this very learned entomologist, and I wondered what black revenge was simmering in the Melanesian heart. Malakai owed Buxton a grudge; up in Samoa the Londoner had twitted him about having hookworm. To disprove the accusation Malakai had examined his specimen by our regulation field method, and had found his case negative. “Suppose you try my Clayton Lane technique,” challenged Buxton—this method was splendid for hospital examinations, but too complicated for fieldwork. Malakai was game. He tried Buxton’s method on himself—and got one solitary, smallish hookworm. So Dr. Buxton had told the world how he had the laugh on a poor N.M.P.
Malakai bided his time. The malaria situation was not acute, because May to November is the “dry season” in the New Hebrides—meaning that it doesn’t rain very hard and mosquitoes are comparatively few. We were on Malekula, and Dr. Buxton had returned from a month’s tour, combing the islands for anopheles. In all his search he had only found two damaged-looking specimens. Where were the mosquitoes? Malakai looked over the sad little exhibit and never turned a hair.