Fieldworkers for the Foundation don’t go about bragging of the bugs they pick up along the way. In twenty-one years I think I caught everything the tropics have to offer, with the exception of yaws, venereal and leprosy. I’m not sure about leprosy. It’s so slow to develop you can’t be sure you haven’t got it until you’ve died of something else.
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We were leaving North Queensland at last, in the seagoing washtub Morinda, Papua bound. In the Australian hot country I had been the Buffalo Bill and the Jim Farley of a whirlwind campaign. I had acted as director there until October, 1919, when Dr. W. A. Sawyer came out to take charge of Australasia. Then there were six months of it, helping him organize.
The North Queensland campaign had offered the combined excitement of a Blitzkrieg and a Methodist revival. I had shouted my sprue-sore mouth raw. I had ballyhooed a Yankee’s message to Australasia—privies and more privies! Our greatest popular hygienist, Mr. Chic Sale, could never have been prouder of his Temple of Necessity than I of my fly-proof, worm-tight w.c. when it was accepted as a model by the committees of North Queensland. I was preaching a crusade, and I was heeded. At Shire Council meetings, soil-pollution questions flamed like torches; labor unions called strikes on and off, excited by thousands of feet of lumber to be hauled and nailed together into latrines; commercial travelers took up the cause and were asking their customers, “Have you got one of those things the Yankees are peddling up and down the coast?”
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Now it was May, 1920, and that was over. The little Morinda was off Cairns; we would be moving, maybe, when the tide rose. I laughed wickedly, remembering what the shattered Dr. Waite said when he left North Queensland to my tender care. “Lambert, if you stick, you’ll probably go out feet-first.” Well, my feet were still under the deck chair where I loafed and totaled up eighteen months of hard campaigning.
We had supervised the building of 4,000 model latrines and repaired 4,000 more up to the standard. We had treated thousands and thousands of hookworm cases; from Proserpine to Cooktown we had examined 98 per cent of the population for intestinal parasites. We hadn’t found infection heavy, but I gloated over the change wrought in many people by the humble expedient of a decent privy behind every house. Brightness was coming back to eyes and skin. Healthy children were playing.
Yes, the Australians are like our Westerners. When there is work to be done they go at it wholeheartedly. Subsequent improvement in North Queensland’s health shows what these people can do.
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The story of the hookworm disease and its cure is a twice-told tale, or a thousand times told in the medical libraries. But because the subject is pertinent to my years of work, let me say a little about a scourge which was so widespread in 1918 that it had but one rival—malaria. Just as Dr. Heiser said, one third of our planet’s inhabitants had hookworm.