All this was news, and Suva had an editor with a keenly developed news-sense. His name was Victor Abel, and among other bold enterprises he ran a paper called the Pacific Age. A daring young chap of a good Anglo-Jewish family, he had raised mules in South Africa, made a failure of it, then come to Fiji to raise hogs, and made a failure of that too. His influential father-in-law was Sir Henry Marks, who worried a great deal about the Pacific Age.
Sir Henry had set his cap for a place on the Executive Council, and you never could tell what the incorrigible Victor would say next to stir up the Government. The town was always agog, waiting for some new outbreak in his personal correspondence column. It was a completely open forum, that column; under all sorts of fancy noms de plume citizens let each other have it, straight in the nose. Then, just to keep the pot boiling, they would change their noms de plume overnight and start thundering on the left. When Victor decided to write anything up he trimmed it artistically. For example, there was his famous account of the government yacht left in Suva harbor with her seacocks open. She gently sank, while the officers and crew were ashore seeing a football game.
In the midst of our growing campaign Victor came to me and said he was pretty sure he had hookworm. He had; and tetrachloride did its work very nicely. “Listen, Doctor,” he said, “what about this magic stuff? Where did it come from? What’s the story? Are you going to bury big news like that in Suva? Tell me about it, let me put it on the wire and I’ll have the whole world sitting up.”
By that time Fiji was certainly sitting up. Natives were clamoring for treatment. Not until the gold rush of ’32 was anything more generally talked about. I wanted Victor to have the story; I said to Victor, “You can run the story provided you keep me out of it—and don’t mention the Foundation, either. Just say that Maurice C. Hall’s treatment is being given. If that’s understood, here are the facts.”
Victor kept his word in an appropriately sensational style, proclaiming that Maurice C. Hall was curing hookworm with a thing called tetrachloride. The news thrilled the medical world, scientific men were mulling over the possibilities of a new and novel drug. How would it come out in Fiji? That was the question.
When the tidings came to Washington, friendly biologists crowded Dr. Maurice C. Hall’s office to congratulate him, and his reply was characteristic. “You say I’ve been curing hookworm in Fiji? Hell, I’ve never been near the place.”
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In a month I had treated more cases than my predecessor had in fourteen months, and with no increased expense. Tetrachloride worked with such accuracy that there was no need of repeated doses, as with chenopodium. By the end of 1922 the Rockefeller Foundation, which had untangled the Hall-Lambert collaboration and duly forgiven my disobedience, reported 52,000 treatments by tetrachloride.
Of these 50,000 had been given in Fiji, under my supervision.
The history of public health cannot be written by the sure-cure patent-medicine man. We had our bumps, at first, but they were amazingly few. In every district where the Willis salt flotation method showed a hookworm frequency of over 60 per cent we rounded the people up and gave the treatment en masse. In regions like the dirty Rewa and Navua districts infection was particularly heavy. In one place we dosed 1,243, and came back in a month to find 1,111 villagers showing negative—about the average sample of our work as it increased to large proportions.