Medical experience had taught me that a pure spirit often dwells in a broken body. When he was a baby a careless nurse had spoiled one of his arms; he had lost a leg when a motorboat fouled a hidden rock, during an emergency call. His success in handling natives was envied, even by his co-religionists. His converts were nearer Christians than most I saw.... I don’t know why I speak of him in the past, for as I write he is very much alive, seventy-three and going strong. We have been corresponding for years, and I bless him for the way he took up my cause for the Central Medical School. His daily work had shown him the need of it.
I can’t forget the way Mr. Paton had the laugh on me one night when I was lecturing the natives in a church at the quaint village of Pangkumu. With unique co-operation he had assigned the contribution box to receive hookworm specimens. The people were pretty badly infected, so I strained my pidgin English to express the horrible fecundity of the female Necator. See the hundreds of snake-eggs she could lay in twenty-four hours.... “Look out!” Paton whispered. Right in front of me a woman with scared eyes was holding a baby. In her fright she let it drop. I had to stop the lecture to look over the casualty, and when I found that no bones were broken Paton laughed softly, “It doesn’t pay to be too sensational.”
Paton knew his natives, and he knew the Condominium well enough to have an incompetent district agent removed now and then. When my Native Medical Practitioners ran afoul of European prejudice Paton never failed to take their part. A French physician objected to our N.M.P. Peni visiting the villages when a whooping cough epidemic was raging—and whooping cough can be deadly down there. The Frenchman wanted the sick to come to his hospital, to sleep outside in leaky shacks until he was ready to treat them. Paton advised Peni to go straight to the villages and save the patients from the shock of being moved, and he acted on that advice. When Mesalume was there—the poor boy who died on duty—Paton often got out his motorboat at small hours in the morning and hurried him to emergency calls. The Government had no launch to send.
During my first visit to Onua I treated 300 hookworm cases, and nearly half of them were women; a remarkable record in a land where women were especially guarded by the feces tabu. Whenever I found a people susceptible to medical advice I always found a good mission in charge. Paton’s was 100 per cent.
The New Hebrides needed dozens of Patons. And Patons don’t come in dozen lots.
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I had finally the meager satisfaction of knowing that the population was taking a slow turn upward—but too slow to hold its own. The men still outnumbered the women; there were not enough of the latter to carry on the breed. In some regions where public health was beginning to pick up I found that the sex balance was working toward a normal equilibrium. That was a good sign, though all too faint. Its promise was dimmed by graver threats of racial annihilation. You can’t draw clean water from a stream that is polluted at the source. The New Hebrides, with no enforced quarantines, no concerted effort to look into the causes of epidemics, no program for restoring the best and healthiest of the native customs, no educational system, and apparently no sincere wish to divorce the savage from liquor and firearms, were well on the road to racial extinction. The slum-scum of the Orient would take over all the jobs of the sick islanders, and succumb to the same diseases. That’s a gloomy picture—but an illustration of what may befall any community, tropical or temperate, where public health and education are not enforced by a strong central authority.
When I was working among the plantations around Male I stayed with M. Peletier, who owned a wide domain, 800 acres of it rich with coffee, cacao, cotton and copra. M. Peletier was equally rich in children from wives and concubines. He had come there as a stranded French sailor, and in middle age his ambition was to retire and live in Los Angeles. The sanitary habits of his laborers were fairly well looked out for—which was refreshing, since I had just seen indescribable filth on near-by plantations.
Well, on Saturday night I retired early in one of M. Peletier’s clean rooms, and had just fallen asleep when the quiet was shattered by drunken native voices. Next morning the natives who had promised to come for a lecture failed to show up. They were sleeping it off.
In the afternoon I drove with the Peletiers to the home of M. Margot, who had the usual store in the back of his house. We were having a glass of wine on the front porch when a crowd of natives appeared and began to file around toward the store. They were none too steady and it was obvious that they had come for more liquor. The Margots gave me an embarrassed glance. Comme c’était embêtant! With a Foundation doctor looking on, knowing that they were selling grog to the heathen! M. Margot rose to the emergency and staged a powerful scene. Blue with indignation, he faced the rioters and asked them what they meant by coming on Sunday, of all days, to buy kerosene and tobacco? Then, turning to me, he explained gently, “They’re just children. If they happen to want kerosene and tobacco they pay no attention to my rules. Such children!”