Yes, these Papuan specters walk along your dreams. The tropics are dreamlands, released from the balance of Northern things. Life down there moves between poetic loveliness and monstrous disgust. I have since seen many other villages like Boera; and I should have become callous, seeing so much of it. I could get used to the maimed adults, but the children always wrung my heart.
It is quite understandable that the early voyagers should have confused yaws with syphilis. That such confusion still persists is reasonable. For all we know of yaws, it may be syphilis modified by Stone Age conditions. We call it framboesia tropica (tropical raspberry). When you speak of yaws you must always speak of syphilis—the two are so alike, with wide differences.
Captain Cook, who first visited the Pacific in 1773, wisely wrote: “Another disease of more mischievous consequences, which is also very frequent, and appears on every part of the body, in large broad ulcers, discharging a thin, clear pus ... it being certainly known and even acknowledged by themselves that the natives are subject to this disease before they were visited by the English, it cannot be the result of venereal contagion, notwithstanding the similarity of the symptoms....”
Here at least is illness you can’t blame on the whites.
The enlightened traders and missionaries who followed Cook sketchily jotted down “syphilis.” All my work in Papua and my following years of careful research over the whole Pacific failed to find one case of syphilis, although I have run across one or two rather doubtful diagnoses. I have never found the tell-tale chancre scar, which is the sure mark. The manifestations of the two diseases run so parallel that carelessness or ignorance have put a libel on the native races.[1]
Yaws is not a venereal disease, nor is it hereditary. It is usually acquired in early childhood. Native mothers expose their babies to it in hopes of “getting it out of their systems,” much as some Yankee mothers do when measles come around.
Now here’s the confusing resemblance. The yaws germ Treponema pertenue is so closely related to the syphilis germ Treponema pallidum that the two are hard to tell apart. Both diseases progress in three of four stages. The “mother yaw” first appears on any part of the body, and its secondary manifestation is a great number of “daughter yaws” which are widely distributed over the skin and progress into the third stage, which is remarkably syphilitic in appearance. Arterial changes and nerve lesions (as in syphilis) sometimes cause the general paralysis of the insane.
Missionaries have an easy way of accounting for yaws: it’s a curse inherited from cannibal ancestors. Certainly it is ugly enough to have come to the world through that black door.
And here’s another parallel. The treatment for yaws is exactly the same as the treatment for syphilis—arsenical injections. Framboesia was quite beyond the reach of medicine until Professor Ehrlich produced his salvarsan. There is nothing more dramatic in medicine than the almost visible growth of healthy tissue over a yaws sore after an arsenical injection.
The Pacific is the one place in the world where yaws is in no way complicated by syphilis. I am told that in Tahiti the two diseases thrive, but the same person never has both. On the Islands there seems to be a cross-immunity, so that the two germs cannot prosper in the same host. Certainly the native has been abundantly exposed to syphilis; East Indian labor, when it came to Fiji, brought with it 75 per cent infection. The Chinese and the white sailors fetched their share and did their amatory best to spread it, but nothing happened. Something had made the native immune, and that something is quite apparent.