Beside the hospital service the sanitary department maintains dispensaries at several points on the line, where necessary drugs are provided for patients in the Commission Service free. Patent medicines are frowned upon, and such as are purveyed must be bought through the Commissary. Medical service is free to employees and their families. All doctors practicing on the Zone are on the gold payroll for wages ranging from $1800 to $7000 a year. I could not find upon inquiry that the fact that they were not dependent upon the patient for payment made the doctors less alert or sympathetic. At least no complaints to that effect were current.
To my mind the most notable effect upon the life of the Zone of this system of free medical attendance was that it added one more to the many inducements to matrimony. Infantile colic and measles are shorn of much of their terror to the young parent when no doctor’s bill attends them. Incidentally, too, the benevolent administration looks after the teeth of the employees as a part of its care of their general health. One effect of this is to impress the visitor with the remarkable number of incisors gleaming with fresh gold visible where Zone folk are gathered together.
TABOGA FROM THE BATHING BEACH
The annual vacations of the workers during the construction period may properly be considered in connection with sanitation work on the Zone, for they were not permitted to be mere loafing time. The man who took a vacation was not allowed to stay on the Isthmus. If he tried to stay there Col. Goethals found it out in that omniscient fashion of his and it was a case of hike for a change of air or go back to work. For, notwithstanding the fact that Col. Gorgas pulled the teeth of the tropics with his sanitary devices and regulations, an uninterrupted residence in that climate does break down the stamina and enfeeble the energy of men from more temperate climes. Every employee was given 42 days’ vacation with full pay, but he had to quit the Zone for some country which would afford a beneficial climatic change. Of course most went back to the United States, being encouraged thereto by a special rate on the steamship of $30—the regular rate being $75. But beside this vacation each employee was entitled to 30 days’ sick leave. It was not an exceedingly difficult task to conjure up enough symptoms to persuade a friendly physician to issue a sick order. The favorite method of enjoying this respite from work was to spend as little of the time as possible at Ancon, and the rest at the sanitarium on the Island of Taboga.
TABOGA IS FURTHERMORE THE CONEY ISLAND OF PANAMA
That garden spot in the Bay of Panama where the French left the sanitarium building we now use is worth a brief description. You go thither in a small steamboat from Balboa or Panama and after about three hours’ steaming a flock of little white boats, each with a single oarsman, puts out from the shore to meet you like a flock of gulls as you drop anchor in a bay of truly Mediterranean hue. To the traveled visitor the scene is irresistibly reminiscent of some little port of Southern Italy, and the reminder is all the more vivid when one gets ashore and finds the narrow ways betwixt the elbowing houses quite Neapolitan for dirt and ill odor. But from the sea one looks upon a towering hill, bare toward its summit, closely covered lower down by mango, wild fig, and ceiba trees, bordered just above the red roofs of the little town by a fringe of the graceful cocoanut palms. Then come the houses, row below row, until they descend to the curving beach where the fishing boats are drawn up out of reach of the tide which rises some 20 feet.
From the bay the village with its red-tiled roofs and yellow-white walls looks substantial, a bit like Villefranche, the port of Nice, but this impression is speedily dispelled when one lands in one of the boats, propelled by the oarsman standing and facing the bow—a fashion seldom seen save in Italian waters. For seen near at hand the houses are discovered to be of the flimsiest frame construction, save for a few clustering about the little church and sharing with it a general decrepitude and down-at-the-heels air that makes us think they have seen better days. As indeed they have and worse days too, for Taboga once shared in the prosperity of the early Spanish rule, and enjoyed the honor of having entertained for a few weeks Sir Henry Morgan, that murderous pirate, who later became a baronet and a colonial governor, as a fine finish after his deeds of piracy and rapine. Taboga must have treated the buccaneer well, for not only did he forbear to sack the town, but so deep was the devotion paid by him and his men to certain tuns of excellent wine there discovered that they let a Spanish galleon, deep-laden with gold and silver, slip through their fingers rather than interrupt their drinking bout.
Tradition has it that the galleon was sunk nearby to save it and its cargo from the pirates, and treasure seekers have been hunting it ever since with the luck that ordinarily attends aspirants for dead men’s gold.