A simple people, allowed to grow up in their own way. Were they the uncivilized ones, or were we? They were not entirely free from tuberculosis; but they seemed to have set up an immunity. Here was a Government without the need of officialdom; no discord, no poverty, no distress, no taxes, no clothing to speak of; and no vices more obnoxious than a little toddy-drinking on national holidays.
I left happy Sikiana with a certain fear for its future. I saw it again in 1933....
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I returned by way of Sydney to pick up my family. In a week or so I would be pointing toward Suva, which was the cultural center of the South Pacific—if you disregard the scientifically advanced universities in Australia and New Zealand. Suva was to be headquarters for the rest of my professional career.
Thus far I had worked toward proving my favorite point: Depopulation follows the visitor. I believed what I still believe—that the item which looms over everything else in the question of failing native races is the introduction of diseases to which they have no immunity. I had seen its effects so often, right under my eyes.
Moving toward Sydney, I took stock of my South Sea experience, which had covered less than four years. I was beginning to see that one bad old theory was losing ground—the belief that the native, especially the Melanesian, is an economic unit to be exploited till he dies. Governments once blind and cruel were beginning to see light. The British High Commission, controlling five island groups, was struggling toward better things. So was progressive New Zealand with her mandates and possessions over wide stretches of Polynesia.
I considered the stumbling blocks in the way of curing sick Oceania. The Rockefeller Foundation, a vast scientific machine tuned up to deal out mercy in a practical, businesslike way, must have a co-operation which the Pacific administrations of that day were not offering. There must be teamwork, or nothing could be accomplished. Medical authority must come from a central brain. As things stood, the health physicians were political appointees, either lazy and incompetent time-servers or good men baffled by overwork and the whims of local government. When one good health officer retired a successor would come in to undo whatever he had begun. It was medical chaos, and I felt that the Foundation’s liberal share in cleaning up the Pacific must be backed up by some unified control. Else the work would be as futile as sweeping fog off a back porch. Suva, capital of Fiji, was headquarters for the British High Commission, and the Governor of Fiji was its head. Suva would be the ideal center for such medical authority.
I considered the problem of leprosy. All along the way I had encountered this imported disease, but there was no census to tell whether or not it was increasing. The cure and prevention of leprosy is methodical treatment with the one known remedy, and segregation of the infected. In all the South Pacific except Fiji there was nothing like a modern leper colony. The island governments should combine to support one.
The shortage of doctors had been very discouraging. Few competent white men cared to endure tropical hardships for starvation pay. From sheer boredom and despair many of them became quacks and drunkards—even if they hadn’t started out that way. The answer to that was educated native medical men.... I have talked about that a great deal, because that idea never left me. And now I was going to Fiji, where there had already been a crude attempt to teach medicine to Fijians.
As our ship neared Suva, a larger worry was in the back of my mind. Through years of study, from North Queensland to Papua, from Papua to New Guinea, from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands, I had found that oil of chenopodium was not working well enough or fast enough to relieve the million patients who reached out for a cure. In Rabaul’s hospital I had given injections of it, hoping to make the drug more effective through a new channel. The experiment had removed whipworms, but almost no hookworms.