When at last I had finished I heard the frightened sigh that fluttered through my audience. A heavy load seemed to fall from my shoulders. I had said it in pidgin, I had made them understand!
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This was the hookworm lecture which, with some improvements, I gave hundreds of times throughout Melanesia, wherever pidgin was spoken; in New Guinea, in the Solomon Islands, in the New Hebrides. Yes, and I took it to New York in 1922, and demonstrated it to the Rockefeller Foundation. When I was asked to address a body of extremely dignified scientific men, Dr. George Vincent encouraged me to repeat my hookworm lecture, for its fame seemed to have arrived before I did. “Give it to them straight,” Dr. Heiser suggested when I took the platform. If my performance added nothing to science, it was at least a comedy success. It panicked ’em, as the actors say. When I came to the part that described Mr. Rockefeller as “Master belonga me him make im altogether kerosene.... Now he old feller.... Money belong him allesame dirt,” solemn scientists who hadn’t smiled for years had to be held up to keep them from falling into the aisles.
CHAPTER IX
“ME CUTTIM WIND, ME CUTTIM GUT!”
The conquest of pidgin cheered me up mightily; and I needed cheering. Toward the close of the New Guinea campaign (October, 1921) I began to realize more and more, through daily practice, that oil of chenopodium was inadequate for the mighty job cut out for it. To do it justice, it did remove worms, quantities of them. The standard method of administering chenopodium was to starve the patient the night before and give him a purge in preparation for next morning’s treatment, which was 15 minims, given at two-hour intervals, at 6 A.M., 8 A.M. and 10 A.M. This was followed by another purge at noon, and he was not permitted to eat until the purge had taken effect.
In North Queensland I had found that even these heroic measures had not reduced the rate of infection, because the people were not taking the drug. Then I decreed that no treatment would count unless inspectors stood by and saw the medicine swallowed. In the early morning hours one could get track of a treatment unit by the sight and sound of front doors bursting open and children running wildly down the street. So I decided to modify the dose by one half, followed by a purge. Re-examination showed somewhat better results.
Old-timers who ran the standard chenopodium campaigns were unsung heroes, and the grinding disappointments drove many good men out of public health work. Examination, treatment, re-examination and retreatment—repeated half a dozen times in any given area—made up a method so extremely slow that by the time work in one region was completed the unremoved female worms had again laid eggs inside our patients; eggs which fell with the excreta to infect the soil once more and permit another horde of larvae to crawl back to the human intestine.
When Colonel Honman at last drafted my services and put me in charge of the native hospital at Rabaul, I was given an ideal chance to experiment and observe. Groups of native patients were chosen and locked behind barbed wire; each was given his dose and a gasoline can for his stools. The latter were washed every twenty-four hours for three days, and the worms counted. After an interval each man would be given a very large dose to remove the remaining worms, so that a percentage of effectiveness of the first dose could be estimated. We tried various combinations of chenopodium: thymol, betanaphthol, even betel-nut (which has a certain degree of vermifuge action). We studied the relation of purge and drug, to find out on what ratio they could be given. At best chenopodium was nauseous and produced many severe symptoms like tingling toes, temporary deafness, vomiting; and there was always the danger of profound poisoning inherent in the powerful drug,—untrained dispensers might grow careless and omit the purge,—and that might prove fatal.
To sum up chenopodium, it was about as popular as the Hammer and Sickle at a Republican rally.