A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

In lighter vein let me tell you about Black Daniel’s other boil, for he had developed a lusty carbuncle on his hip. I opened it with the cleverest instrument at hand, a razor blade; and with no anesthetic, of course. Daniel had no ambition to be a Christian martyr. It took four of his disciples to hold him down while I drained out the pus, and he called on his Saviour in the voice of a wounded lion.

His Sikiana flock was a contrast in stoicism. Their beautiful teeth were going—ill-balanced diet, probably—and in one afternoon Malakai and I extracted thirty teeth. We had only straight forceps, and it was a pretty mangling job; but we didn’t hear a moan during the whole ordeal.

Like all primitives, the people of Sikiana confused the diagnosis with the cure; remember how the Cook Islanders had thought I could make them well by putting a stethoscope on their chests? Tuberculin injections are merely given for negative or positive reactions. But to them the needle was a sovereign remedy, and they always went away smiling. Only the very young children objected when the point was jabbed under their skin. As to the others their faith was rather heartrending. It was the same all over the Solomons.

After the boil operation Black Daniel so far relented as to let his congregation dance for us, with the beautiful old-fashioned abandon—but with plenty of clothes on. It was the first time in three years that they had been allowed to revert to this pretty, jolly paganism. Before our otter boat pulled us back to the Zaca, Daniel and his three dusky assistants occupied four chairs and consented to be photographed. Gathered around them a group of Sikiana girls in white pinafores and white capes looked for all the world like tropical Girl Scouts. Templeton Crocker, suffering from a lame foot and feeling satirical, watched the photographic group, a drift of snow with a bucket of coal in the middle. “The Four Black Crows,” he said, thinking of a popular vaudeville team. But the holy dictator and his followers were speeding us on our way with “God be with you till we meet again.”

God be with Sikiana, I thought glumly. For twelve years that little place had been one of the pets of my memory. I decided that it would need a hustling Native Medical Practitioner, if anything was to be accomplished.

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We interrupted our work and turned back to Tulagi. Dr. Hynes had reported that Toschio, our Japanese photographer, was so ill that he needed hospital attention. Crocker’s sore foot had caused a friendly disagreement between Hynes and me. Before he reached Suva, the Zaca’s owner had scratched his foot on some submerged coral. He had pluckily said nothing about it until the infection had begun heating up. As a young graduate of New York’s Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Hynes might have been a bit more interested in major operations than in minor bruises. But I had seen many coral scratches and knew that they could, if neglected, prove as stubbornly hard to cure as a gastric ulcer.

At Tulagi—in the humble little capital, very neat and British—we ran into a mess of colonial politics. My very good friend J. C. Barley, who had won the general approval of the High Commission and had aided the natives in so many kindly ways that they thought of him as “Government,” had been sidetracked again. Captain Ashley had come back as Resident Commissioner, and that had left Barley, the obvious choice, out in his small post on Auki; Barley, who knew more about the customs, language and social traditions of the people than any white man who had ever lived on the Solomons; Barley, whose affection for the natives was fatherly, and who had devoted his splendid life to them.

At last I got around to see Captain Ashley, who had been so kind about helping me on my first Rennell trip and had sent out a relief boat to find me. What I wanted to talk about more than anything else was Solomon Island candidates for our Central Medical School. We had two native practitioners working on the group. Dr. Hetherington, the C.M.O., had only one white physician whom he could put in the field. There were a few medical missionaries, some of them very good—especially those of the Melanesian Mission, which had a leper asylum of sorts on Malaita.

How about getting some more Solomon Island students into our school at Suva? Well, the Protectorate was about broke—stony truth—and even our small tuition would be burdensome. Norman Wheatley of New Georgia had sent his two sons, Trader Kuper of Santa Ana was educating his older boy, Geoffrey, in a New Zealand school. Geoffrey seemed especially bright, and ought to make a fine N.M.P.