Primitive folk made a carnival of our coming; drums sounded and they all reached out for the wizard drops. They called it “toddy” and said it was fine because it made them drunk. Possibly it did, a little. After a child’s-size dose small boys would run around like wild dogs, tear up the flower beds in mission compounds, throw mud and have a perfectly bully time. Full-grown “marys” would caper and dance like Aunt Dinah at an old-fashioned revival; but when their big buck husbands smacked them they would come back to normal with surprising alacrity. Most of the demonstrations were merely put on; our patients usually went wild before the drug could have had time to take effect. However, tetrachloride has a mildly intoxicating reaction, especially if it is not administered with some technical care. But these demonstrations were mostly psychological—the native craving for a big joy party. The British have been more than wise in keeping alcohol away from these people.
After the first two years of wholesale treatments we had to report seven deaths. Postmortems under the observation of able physicians revealed the causes. These seven were all East Indians. One of them, it turned out, hadn’t taken tetrachloride at all; it had been chenopodium. One lad who died had a congenital malformation of the intestine, a deformity which would have prevented his living to maturity. Another was a woman who was addicted to the use of alcohol. The remainder were children heavily infected with Ascaris lumbricoides (roundworm).
When the deaths came, after forty thousand treatments, I took it pretty hard. I had gambled for success with everything I had, my job, and my professional good name. I felt as though I hadn’t a friend in the world. Then who came unexpectedly to my support? Dr. Basil Wilson, whom I had always thought of as a queer sort of Englishman with an aversion to me, if any feeling at all. Stanchly Dr. Wilson did the friendly thing; he postmortemed the bodies and developed theories as to the cause of death so sound that they stand on record today. Among his medical colleagues he became my champion. Worry was aging me years in a day until Wilson’s support renewed my youth with courage. Funny Englishman; I could have kissed his long, homely face.
Since that first setback tetrachloride has not caused one death among the thousands of Melanesians, Polynesians, East Indians and Europeans whom we treated.
The fatalities were limited to victims of alcoholism and roundworm. That was interesting; more especially in Ascaris cases. Alcohol was contra-indicated; a few drinks before or after treatment brought complications. Lingering headaches which came to many of the nondrinkers were easy to relieve with an after-dose of salts. But what about the roundworm? Why did his presence in the intestine turn tetrachloride into an active poison? I don’t think that question has been settled yet. One theory says that CCl₄, while it does not kill the Ascaris, irritates him to a point where he secretes lethal toxic juices. According to Dr. Lamson and his collaborators, poisoning with tetrachloride occurs in dogs when there is a lowered blood calcium. This chemical poverty may have something to do with it; I make the conjecture, without being able to substantiate it, that there is a relation between a large number of ascarides and a lowered blood calcium.
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In the course of the next ten years 286,486 Pacific Islanders were treated, under my personal observation, with carbon tetrachloride and the later drug, tetrachlorethylene.
For the gifted Dr. Hall had come across with an improvement on his discovery, and he asked me to give it its first tryout when I campaigned in the wild New Hebrides in 1925. I used it extensively down there, and optimism sounded in my conservatively worded report. Its work was faster, its toxic effect less than that of his original find. There is no 100 per cent in medicine, but Hall’s new polysyllabic drug was hitting an average that was uncanny.
What a wizard he was, this pre-eminent zoologist, who was Washington’s Number One horse doctor! Every pet dog wags his tail (or should) in gratitude for his two deworming remedies. The dog’s pal, the human, is Hall’s debtor—all but the fur dealers. The price of silver fox has taken a terrific slump. Do you know why? Dr. Hall sent his tetrachlorides to the fox farms where so many hookwormy bitches and pups used to die that pelts had become a luxury for the wives of steel barons. When Hall’s treatments came to Foxville the breed picked up rapidly and its fur went to the lower department stores; so now every stenographer can have her silver fox—and on her own salary, too. Ask your furrier.
Dr. Hall is dead now. I know it’s trite to say that such men don’t really die. He has put his own spark into millions of men, women and children who would be in their graves today were it not for what he freely gave. He was an untold benefit to the human race. Most of the human race, of course, have never heard of him.