A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

Up to the day I retired the Foundation was always a little nervous about what I was going to do next. They were usually asking, by inference, “Where is Lambert going to pop up now?” Dr. Heiser’s immediate reaction to whatever I put up to him was a simple, “No,” and I had to pound away at him until he gave up. As I have said before, he was very careful with Mr. Rockefeller’s silver dimes, and his honest stubbornness deserves great credit. Dr. Sawyer, who bossed me during my early days in the Pacific, was a strong advocate of the Central Medical School, for he knew the needs of the islands. Sawyer is now the Foundation’s Director of the International Health Division, and still a little nervous about me. He wants me settled on a Californian farm where I’ll be out of mischief. Sawyer is one of the most brilliant research scientists of our time. Considering his environmental background he is extremely broad-minded—he comes of a family of clergymen. I shall never forget the time I led him up to a North Queensland bar where the Australians were sneering “Wowser!” at every prohibitionist. Sawyer ordered ginger ale, drank it and made them like him. With the same puritanical gusto he backed me up in the Medical School. I shall always be grateful to him.

I had estimated that it could be financed by a contribution of £1,500 each from seven island groups. Fiji’s sudden decision that she could start a School of her own on a one-horse scale had given more point to my argument when I went back to the States and put it up to the Foundation. I had talked pretty steadily for half a year, informing the unsympathetic ones that Fiji’s stingy plan would set the School back about twenty years.

In 1927 I had come back to Suva with the Board’s promise in my pocket. They would fund half the expense of the larger plan. This was economical still, and hardly adequate for what we needed; but we had enough now to get things going. I had wrestled with the Foundation’s Department of Medical Sciences, to whom I had to appeal for the sort of funds required. To give out money to the very finest medical schools and raise their already high standards was the Department’s end and aim. To finance a little idea like ours gave them an almost physical nausea. I didn’t get anything out of them, except to make them admit that some lower grade of medical education might be useful, until their high-flown notions had time to turn out crack specialists to serve the teeming millions who lacked anything but witch doctors to care for them.

The Department of Medical Sciences remained adamant. I finally got the money from the International Health Board itself. This was the first time they had given financial support to the building of medical schools. Up to then it had always been in the hands of the Department of Medical Sciences.

The time would come when we would need more buildings and equipment, that was obvious. The time might also come when some jealous local politician would attempt to wreck the School, or drain it white. A little man can do big mischief, as we found later when a domestic colonial secretary worked his political best to destroy our planned Unified Health Commission, for the petty reason that Fiji’s Chief Medical Officer would head it with a few pounds larger salary than his own. He was of the old anti-American type, which has done so much to promote ill feeling both between England and her colonies and England and America. His kind, I hope, is passing. This little man was not quite able to interfere with co-operation in the Mokogai Leper Colony, which we started back in 1923 and saw built into one of the finest leprosaria in the world.

But the School was open, and we were down to the realism of immediate figures. We could admit forty, and the cost per student would be ninety pounds. There was a wooden dormitory, a main building seventy-six by thirty feet, and the Principal’s house. We were well staffed with the Chief Medical Officer, the pick of the government physicians and local practitioners. We also had the Government’s pharmacist, a dentist, the Government’s bacteriologist and chemist, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s modest representative. We had plenty of textbooks and scientific instruments. In fact we had about everything but room to turn around in.

******

I wasn’t dissatisfied that afternoon in 1928 when I made another inspection of the buildings. Our feet were on the ladder, we were going up. The other things would come, though there was plenty of fighting ahead.

I had to reflect on the slow and painful beginnings of the Native Practitioner system, some forty-two years before. In 1875 the Colony was frightened by the measles epidemic which burned the Fijians down, and with only the puniest attempt at medical aid. Thirteen years later the British residents were appalled by the danger of smallpox, brought in by the East Indian invasion. The Government well knew that the most important medical need was vaccination, but the expense of European vaccinators in this work seemed overwhelming. Health in those days was in the charge of Dr. Corney, Fiji’s second great Medical Officer. Sir William Macgregor, later Governor of Papua, was the first, and Dr. Montague was the third of the great ones. In Corney’s day the Colony, in desperate need, was sending out natives to administer vaccine to an endangered population.

Corney saw how dextrous these men could be with instruments and how quickly they won the confidence of half-wild villagers. Perhaps the Colony’s financial embarrassment was what touched off his imagination. At any event, in the late eighties, after the Government had voted small sums for vaccination purposes, Corney surprised them all by suggesting that the native boys be given some systematic medical education. In January, 1889, eight Fijians passed the examination and were given certificates.