It takes a keen expert eye to mark out leprosy in its early stages; the experienced sisters on Makogai can spot it at once; slight discolorations, slight skin anaesthesias. In the Pacific where civilized early treatment is given you see no such horrid sights as meet you at every turn in India and China. In 1926 we were rounding up Cook Island lepers and sending them to the Mokogai colony.
Leprosy is not indigenous to the Pacific, and there are evidences of its rather recent importation. It has been there long enough to have a folklore, and natives generally believe that a leper can will his sickness on an enemy. These natives know that the disease is transmissible, but if the patient is your friend you can live and eat with him. If he is your foe, do not touch anything he has touched. In Tahiti they tell of a goatherd who was caught in a sudden rain and borrowed a shirt from his pal, who happened to be a leper. When people asked him if he wasn’t afraid of catching it he said, “Why? He’s my best friend. Why should he want to pass it on to me?”
Aitutaki offered a plain picture of two diseases which have only recently scourged the Cooks—elephantiasis and leprosy. They seemed to have no native name for the disfiguring offshoot of filariasis; it was too new for them to have given it a name. Aitutaki’s burying places showed that they had been a larger race only a few generations back. The bones were longer and sturdier and the skulls showed clean white teeth. Among the living, I found all too many cases of dental decay. Their white-toothed forefathers had not tasted sugar, nor become dependent on the trader’s white flour. From what I could find out, the Aitutaki of 150 years ago had known no serious infections except yaws, which they called tona, as all Polynesians did.
About seventy-five years ago a man from Tahiti imported leprosy and nobody could make out what it was. Then the belief grew that the curse came to those who defiled the sanctity of those family ceremonial grounds, the marai. They tell of a European who burned a trash-pile on an ancient marai, and was cursed. Nobody felt sorry for him; they had warned him of what would happen. The marai was so sacrosanct that none but members of the family were allowed to weed the plot, and nobody could build a fire on it. One on Amuri was so vengeful that its black stones poisoned the nuts falling from surrounding trees. Those who ate these nuts would be afflicted with swollen lips. Ancestral ghosts are jealous guardians.
On Christmas Day, 1925, I gave a party for the natives who had helped me generously with my work. To foster competition and please myself with a pretty show, I offered a prize for the best hura dancer among the girls. One of the prettiest creatures that ever shook a grass skirt was a light-colored native named Ann Masters, winner from the start. After her lovely hura she put on European clothes, and looked as though she had just walked off Park Avenue. In my role as dancing master I taught her the fox-trot. We danced for two hours, I imagine.
Afterwards, one of the residents asked me if I knew about Palmerston Island. Palmerston? Well, yes; it had a bad reputation for leprosy. And my friend asked if I knew that an Englishman named Masters had brought the disease there, and that his descendants were known as “the leprous Masters”? Did I know that Ann was the daughter of a Masters who had moved to Rarotonga? I wasn’t much flustered, hearing about Ann. Why worry the doctor who had given reward-of-merit fox-trot parties all over the Cooks?
Two years later I went with Dr. Heiser to inspect the rapidly improving leper colony at Mokogai. The island was divided into a “clean” side and a “dirty” side. On the clean side lived the resident natives and the hospital staff, a respectful distance from where the lepers were kept. I had no sooner crossed the deadline to the “dirty” than I heard a sweet voice in the peculiar jargon of Palmerston calling out, “How do you do, Doctor?” It was Ann Masters, still trig and young to outward appearances. The doctors said she was too far gone to get well, but later I was happy to hear that she was on the road to recovery. I have a photograph of her, one I took at the Christmas party. Today, with my increased experience in spotting the symptoms, I can see many indications of the disease in that pretty face.
On that same visit to Mokogai I had another surprise. Two familiar figures strolled down the beach and waved their hands at me. I recognized the cook and housemaid who had served me so well when I lived on Aitutaki in 1932.
Certainly it is a slow, conservative germ, and I stand as a human example. A dozen years ago I must have been exposed to it a number of times, yet I show no leprous symptoms.
One woman I examined on Atiu haunts my dreams. Because she showed suspicious signs I made a hasty bare-handed examination—conditions were too crude for the physician to protect himself with rubber gloves. My fingers went under her arm to examine the ulnar nerve—and struck a big, mushy ulcer. I couldn’t find soap or even fresh water, so I walked for nearly an hour until I could wash my hands.