Ardently I wrote:
The Foundation gives cheerfully to help medical schools for Chinese, Spanish, English and what you please, to people who are better able to help themselves than these poor blacks out here who are as eager for a chance of this sort as ever a white man was. The Board could give this school and fund half of a teacher’s salary; the other half might be made up by the different groups ... the money would produce results at a far higher rate than in England or Canada....
The reply came from 61 Broadway. Dr. Heiser with his usual sagacity had found the plan reasonable and practical. But the Foundation is so vast that it must be zoned into many divisions, such as a Division of Medical Sciences, a Division of Social Sciences, a Division of the Humanities, and so on. And the Division of Medical Sciences was dead against us; it was out for ambitious projects, and thought mine very third-rate indeed. Rockefeller millions were going into the great establishment in Peking. No use throwing good money after bad, on little squirt schools in the Pacific. After years of my dinging away at the subject, Heiser himself grew cold and asked me to forget it. Peking and many others were the big health investments....
Well, where is Peking today, after the Japanese have finished? And Fiji? I’m saving that information for dessert.
It is one of the ironies of our times, and a quaint one, that the Rockefeller Foundation mailed the Japanese a large check for their Public Health School on the same day the Mikado’s army bombed to powder a beautiful library which the Foundation had given to Chungking.
CHAPTER XII
A DOCTOR EX OFFICIO
I was a dog without a collar, medically speaking. Official Fiji had heard about the avaricious Yankee, planting himself on foreign soil to amass a dishonest fortune. In 1922 a law was passed, for my personal benefit, to the effect that no American could practise medicine in Fiji without a “special permit.” The special permit was far less potent than a chauffeur’s license, and my official status, if any, was somewhat lower than that of the N.M.P. (Native Medical Practitioner). Until 1937 I was not legally qualified to treat anything but hookworm. In the meantime I had treated and been responsible for the care of hundreds of thousands of cases of hookworm, yaws, malaria, tuberculosis, ringworm and so on. Come to think of it, I hadn’t been a lawfully qualified physician in Papua and New Guinea. When Dr. McGusty came to power in Suva, he huffed and he puffed and he said, “All nonsense!”—and proceeded to get me a respectable license. In 1937 the Empire discovered that I was in Fiji, and I joined the British Medical Association.
Not that it mattered. Montague and I were together, never slipping a cog. He wasn’t the sort who fishes for praise, and he never failed to give me credit, if credit were due.
Fiji was a case of racial decline, with a trend upward. Briefly, the population fell from its 200,000 in the hearty cannibal days of 1870 to 105,000 in the Christian year 1891. The census of 1905 showed an appalling drop to 87,000; epidemics of endemic dysentery and whooping cough had decimated them every year; then measles swooped down on these non-immunes. A pause in the death rate, and in 1911 a slight increase in population which was to continue until 1917 when there were 91,000 living Fijians. They might have risen in eight years to the 1891 level but for the withering blast of influenza in 1918-1919. Once again they recovered from a low of around 82,000 until the New Year of 1937 showed a population of 98,291.