Toward the end of my term in New Guinea a situation arose in a native ward which compelled me to take advantage of this popular dread of mutilation. Influenza had flared up on the plantations. The plague that laid our soldiers low in American training camps had visited the South Pacific also, in 1918-1919, and played havoc with these non-resistant people. Since then, it had broken out sporadically; but health officers had learned more about it and were holding it down better than before.
I had returned from the field and found the native hospital filled with flu cases; many were dying in the collapse from pneumonia. The sudden deaths among seemingly mild cases puzzled me, until I probed into the cause. Our native attendants hated to lose sleep; as soon as they were snoring, the sick men, hot with fever, would sneak out of a side door and go down to lie in the sea and cool off under the stars. Then they would sneak back to bed and die of shock.
I put a stop to all that. Native attendants had told them how I slit open dead men’s bellies. (I had performed thirty-three postmortems to determine the average native content of whipworms.) My ogreish fame had spread among a simple folk who would far rather lose a life than a leg. To them I was master of life and death—and the postmortem table.
Therefore I profited by my foul reputation and marched through the ward brandishing a large amputation knife, and as I passed along rows of quaking cots I shouted: “Suppose you no stop along bed, you sons of bitches, suppose you no takim medicine good feller, now you die finish, me cuttim bell’ belong altogether, me cuttim heart, me cuttim wind, me cuttim gut belong you feller. But suppose you good feller altogether, now you die finish, me no cuttim you.”
Dark faces turned green. If they died in a state of disobedience their bodies would go to butchery on the postmortem table; what chance would their gutted souls have in a heaven where true men walk high, wide and handsome?... After my threat they turned into completely docile patients, and we had hardly a case of pneumonia when they were dying of it elsewhere, all over Rabaul.
Twenty men in this ward had been rounded up and jailed for cannibalism. I went to Colonel Honman and described an experiment I wished to make. We all knew of Dr. Heiser’s brilliant success in the treatment of leprosy. Chaulmoogra oil was no new thing; lepers had been given it by mouth for a couple of thousand years. When Heiser experimented with it in the Philippines he didn’t change the remedy—he changed the method. He tried chaulmoogra oil in intramuscular injections, with tremendously improved results.
I didn’t expect to obtain any such startling effects. What I wanted to know mainly was whether chenopodium acted directly on hookworms in the bowel, or whether it was absorbed into the blood stream first and was then ingested by bloodsucking.
The twenty cannibals were on the road to recovery from influenza, and for experimentation Colonel Honman selected six who were heavily infected with hookworm. They had already been condemned to hang as an example to their outlaw village, so it didn’t matter whether the poor devils died in bed or at a rope’s end. My plan was to try intramuscular and intravenous injections of chenopodium.
The result proved harmless to the patients and surprising to the rest of us. In our tests on three of the patients chenopodium was mixed with camphorated oil and resorcin, following Heiser’s formula for preparing chaulmoogra oil. These three men were given intramuscular injections in this form, followed by purgatives, and their stools were examined for a period of six days. From Case Number 1 we got only four hookworms in five days; from Case Number 2 two hookworms and one Ascaris. But Case Number 3 offered the main interest. To him we gave an intravenous injection of chenopodium undiluted. After six days we had recovered twenty-two whipworms and only three hookworms, although this patient, like the other two, was heavily infected with hookworm. In Case 3, then, injections of unmixed chenopodium had a far greater effect on whipworms than on hookworms.
In the three who were given intravenous injections results were: