These early students got only the bare bones of a living. They were huddled together in a bure in the old Colonial Hospital grounds, and spent a good deal of their time working their gardens for enough vegetables to keep going. They had no lecture room, no models or diagrams; postmortem examinations were not easily obtained and almost the only apparatus for anatomical study was a set of bones. When medical officials had time to teach these boys they casually handed them some practical work in the Hospital. Most of the nursing duties fell on their shoulders, as the Matron was the only trained nurse in Fiji. There was some improvement in 1900, when a lecture room was built. Somewhat later improvements advanced as far as a wooden students’ quarters.

In 1898 the students went on strike, which resulted in the improvements of 1900. As a body they called upon the officials and announced that they wanted the whole-time services of a cook, otherwise they were going back home. The authorities concluded that they were probably human beings, so the point was carried. After several years the eight-student school had turned out approximately twenty Native Medical Practitioners. These men were working for something like seven pounds a year, all told, but they were given free gardens to cultivate for themselves. They earned two pounds ten as Provincial Vaccinators, and in 1905 their salaries jumped to between eighteen pounds and fifty pounds. Seven years later their usefulness was recognized by another increase in salary; this time they were divided into first, second and third class. A first-class N.M.P. was getting as much as one hundred pounds a year. When the new School was opened, they were making around one hundred and fifty pounds.

The products of this low-paid, rough-and-ready education won their spurs early. In the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 three of the old students died at their posts as dispensers in the Colonial Hospital. Eight in all died, out of a total of forty-eight. In no case was there any complaint that an N.M.P. had failed in his duty so long as he was able to lift a hand.

In December, 1928, a new order was coming to pass, I hoped. The door was open, not too wide, but young men were passing through with a keen desire to get the best that modern methods could give. That door would have to swing wider. It mustn’t close again. Neither politics nor prejudice nor indifference must slam it shut in the faces of those who had come so earnestly to learn. I was canny enough to suspect that there would be the same percentage of failures you will find in any college anywhere—ten following years of experience taught me that the average was less. They had something more than the desire to get on in the world, which inspires so many European professional students. That December evening I talked with several of the incoming class, the boys who were not too shy to speak out. Why did they want to go into medicine? The answer I got from them was usually the same: “Because I want to do something for my own people.”

It was about then that I pulled in my belt and promised myself that so long as I was alive and in Fiji I wouldn’t let them down.

PART THREE

CHAPTER I

OLD BRANDY AND NEW EGGS

First let’s try to peg the story down to the spring of 1931, when I put a bottle of rare old brandy under my arm and went up a very New Yorkish elevator to see Mr. Raymond Fosdick. The brandy, worth its weight in gold, if you could price it at all, had been given to me in exchange for three dozen fresh eggs.

Mr. Fosdick, as legal advisor to the Rockefellers, was also an important trustee of the Foundation, therefore my business with him was legitimate. So was the brandy, although America was then in the throes of Amendment Eighteen.