A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

I have described the technique of getting hookworm, but because the question was most important to me on Rennell, I hope to be forgiven for describing it again.

Little tins are given out for feces specimens, and their contents examined. If you want worms you choose the people who have been found positive through examination; positive because hookworm eggs have been found in their specimens. You dose them with the drug, say tetrachloride, then you give them a “jerry,” which is usually a five-gallon benzine tin, and tell them that all their bowel motions for die day must be deposited in the big container. A purge has been given after the tetrachloride, to hurry things up. At the end of twenty-four hours the whole stool is washed through several thicknesses of surgical gauze until only a sediment remains. This sediment is taken by tablespoonful and floated with a little water in a photograph tray, where the worms can be seen with difficulty, especially if die patient has been eating fibrous vegetables. Then he is given another saline purge and he deposits his bowel motion for another twenty-four hours. Then the same procedure is repeated. To do a good job another day’s collection should be made. This is difficult in a hospital, and much more difficult among savages. In New Guinea we had to put them behind barbed wire, in Fiji we often locked them up.

On Rennell we were not given permission to do this work until the last few days, and we only got Tahua’s consent by paying him liberally in fishhooks. The examinations were on the beach, and the subjects all girls; they had been forced to submit by the Big Master, who cannily believed that if some magic curse should fall on a few girls it wouldn’t matter. Malakai and Gordon were supposed to keep guard over these patients; but with new ones coming all the time, they were probably not very well watched. The infection was very light, and probably many of the stools missed. Later on, when we examined the material, we found no worms. The trouble was that the Big Master’s permission had come so late that a technique suited to such bizarre circumstances was impossible. The delay resulted in our frustration.

They had no conception of disease. When it came to tuberculin tests we had immense difficulty in getting them to report for more than one injection, for the Big Parade was always going on and they didn’t want to miss any of it. Time, of course, was nothing to them. That mental quirk, as well as those above noted, worked dead against us. Remember, it was a land of savages, a stark beach, no houses to speak of and an almost constant rain. Add to this the native’s superstitious shyness. Once, when I caught Buia in a very personal occupation, he almost died of fear.

I had done my best to inquire into the prevalence of gonorrhea, the old enemy of racial fertility. Examinations were, of course, out of the question—you could examine a Rennellese man only by felling him with an ax. I suspected that this venereal germ had revisited Rennell, and when I looked over our crew after departure my suspicions were justified. I could learn little from a people who in no way associated the infection with promiscuity; they regarded all disease as merely a curse following the violation of a tabu, even an unconscious violation. But what I found that our sailors had picked up from Rennell alarmed me as to the island’s future. The barriers were down, the White Sands were offering the most generous hospitality to visiting sailors. I had seen other island populations sink for similar reasons.

A nightly chore was counting the sick aboard ship. Templeton Crocker’s foot was about well; however we had persuaded him not to bruise it again in that awful overland walk to the Lake. Stuart, our botanical collector, was in bed with a severe leg ulcer. He had tramped all over Java and Borneo in the Chancellor-Stuart expedition, and now he chafed because his legs were not taking him along. Toschio seemed to have recovered from the sickness that took us to Tulagi, and otherwise we seemed fit to carry on. Except that I was suffering from a boil on my leg.

One night Buia came aboard and asked Malakai to intervene with Mr. Crocker for more food for the people who had come down to be treated. Malakai, always a sympathetic observer of the natives, said that he had watched them and they had gone all day without a thing to eat. These people were nomads, really—nomads on an island fifty miles long. When they traveled they never thought of carrying provisions. I went to Crocker, and found him generous again. In free feeds for Rennell he had already dipped pretty deep into our stock of eatables, but he managed to dig up another banquet and send it ashore. I asked Buia why the people went hungry when they could fish in the bay, and he said it was tabu to eat fish from the bay while our sewage was emptying there.

I caught Buia off his guard and told him that I had learned the names of the two Gods who ruled his island: they were the old Tetanosanga, whose girth measured ten fathoms, and his grandson Teaitutabu. Listening to the sacred words, Buia stood aghast and begged me never, never to say those names again. Only the Big Masters could speak them, and that only in a whisper. I liked Buia for his reverence, when he prayed away my rash impiety. While he prayed I felt that faith had not departed from his people, and might strengthen them to stand against the white invader, as they had stood against the Tongafiti.

Prayer was a part of their daily lives. Gordon Macgregor on his visit to the Lake saw a sacred and secret ceremony never before shown to a white man. He had asked a question, and old Taupangi went into a “sweating trance,” seeking divine guidance. His two companions held the chiefs heavily perspiring body while his eyes rolled and his head fell. They were afraid he would die. At last his assistant took a strip of tapa and bound it tightly around his waist to squeeze out the possessing spirit. Then he recovered from his trance and delivered a somewhat confused message: Possibly it would be all right, he said, for his son to go on a trip with Macgregor.

Taupangi was the only one of the five Big Masters who could speak directly to God. The others had to communicate through an intermediary. Tahua lacked the mystic power. With receptive soul he had waited all his life for God to enter him and show favor, but he died with his wish unanswered.