Then let’s sum up the work of tetrachloride over seventeen years since the enterprising Victor Abel first put it on the wire. Dr. Heiser, authority on public health, used to call hookworm the world’s most prevalent disease; in all Earth’s population one out of three had it, he said. Then the figures on tetrachloride (and tetrachlorethylene) treatments went up and up; 654,896 in 1924; 3,000,000 in 1936. In 1937 I attended a League of Nations conference in Java. A group of us were discussing hookworm treatments. I was pretty cocky about the 500,000 done in the Pacific; so I asked Dr. Chellapa of Ceylon how many they were doing there. Last year had been a pretty bad one, he said—they had only given 1,400,000 treatments on account of the malaria epidemic. They usually got 2,000,000 he explained. I just said, “Very fine, indeed,” in a manner I hope wasn’t patronizing. I never mentioned our figures. However, in Ceylon they are using the same old Fiji formula and dosage.
One statement may be simpler than these figures. Every year the Rockefeller Foundation used to publish a bulletin of the number of hookworm treatments. In 1938 hookworm was not even mentioned in the Foundation’s report, except for data on some still undefined parasite recently found in Egypt. The report had no general heading for ankylostomiasis. The worm which had been the source and inspiration of their world campaigns had dropped out of their ken.
My application of Hall’s discovery immediately heightened my prestige all over the Pacific. I don’t claim credit. I happened to be the man who stood at the crossroads when a wonderful sort of salvation came my way. I would have been a fool if I hadn’t seized it and carried it on. And what a lucky afternoon that was, early in 1922, when I read a little article and found a brown bottle labeled CCl₄. It gave me the courage I needed to strengthen me for a message of my own, which I knew I must work out and make clear in the hard days that were to follow.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
DEATH AND THE DEVIL
The relation between modern medicine and primitive witchcraft became so important to me during my years of health campaigning in the South Pacific that I think I should say something here to indicate the islander’s daily reliance on sorcery’s touch with the powers of darkness. During all my work among the remoter tribes I was not received and respected as a university M.D., but as a novel sort of witch doctor who had come among them with a stronger magic than the old. Otherwise I could have made no headway at all. My assistants and I were professional sorcerers, backed by Government; we were that, or we were nothing.
It was some time before I got a glimmer of this native point of view, then I began to take advantage of it. I had to. I had to let them believe that I was a mystic with a ritual that would take away the diseases with which sorcery had cursed them. When I gave tuberculin injections to the wild men of Malaita they believed that I was doing something to remove a wicked spell. In thousands and thousands of cases which I have treated, either for cure or diagnosis, they have gone away with the same simple faith. Good magic has been working against bad. At first I worried about fooling all the people all the time. Then I followed the only expedient that is practical in jungle medicine.
When we regard the native tribe as a unit we must not push the witch doctor aside as a buffoon and a faker. Let’s give the devil-man his due and mark the fallacy of the smug European who sits among dark races with the idea of “giving them good laws” and “teaching them morality.” This white man forgets that from the dawn of time the medicine man has held a position that is both useful and important to the tribe. Communities with no prison system must be controlled by a hand which, to them, reaches into the Invisible. In the old days sorcery was the prerogative of the chief, and sorcery was a hereditary and honored profession. And even today the wizard, either a chief or a commoner, is there to fend the people from epidemics, to cure their ills, to curse the enemy and to shield his flock from the invasion of evil spells—“and to sustain all those subtle influences that go to form the social cement that marks the difference between a community and a horde of men,” as Pitt-Rivers expressed it.
The sorcerer occupies, in his way, the same position as the Christian priests who bless the armies and the harvests and metes out spiritual justice to the sheep and the goats. When he tells the natives of ancient Christian miracles, why should they value his words beyond those of their own miracle workers?