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A Yankee doctor in paradise

Chapter 30: FOOTNOTES:
By S. M. Lambert
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About This Book

A first-person memoir describes work on public-health campaigns across South Pacific islands, documenting efforts to diagnose, treat, and prevent parasitic and tropical diseases while organizing field clinics and community education. The narrative blends travelogue episodes with interactions among colonial officials and local communities, and includes practical descriptions of campaign logistics and medical methods. Interwoven reflections consider cultural contrasts, daily life in remote settlements, and the persistent challenges of adapting medical practice to island environments.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Recent Wassermann tests on the Maoris of the Bay Islands, New Zealand, have revealed 13.05 per cent syphilitics. There is no yaws in New Zealand.

[2] Pronounced “Mokongai,” and would be so spelled, except for the typographical feat described on pages 129-130. In most Fijian words I have used the correct Fijian spelling instead of the fantastic anglicized form.

[3] Some months later I did penance for that moment’s slip in courage. A learned man who had studied tropical medicine in London announced that the human hookworm could infect the pig and be carried by him. This was a serious claim, likely to upset all calculations; especially since he declared that he had proved his theory on a South Pacific island. I wanted to find out for myself, so I went to a friend whose wife had a pet pig that she had raised on a concrete floor to avoid that curse of Fiji’s swine growers, intestinal parasites. I examined the pig, found it negative, then hog-tied it and laid it, several times, on a bed heavily infested with human hookworm larvae. It got a severe “ground itch,” first symptom of infection. In due time I did a postmortem on the animal and found many abscesses in the liver and kidneys, but no worms in the intestines—fair evidence that human hookworms do not infect pigs.

Then I did the experiment in reverse: got a pig that was extremely heavy with pig hookworm and tied a poultice of the hatching material on my arm. Result: “ground itch,” but no infection. Showing, at least, that pig hookworm couldn’t thrive in a tough bird like me. I cut open this tender young pig, and a good look at its wormy insides sickened me. As a martyr to science I only suffered through my pocket. The lady had been saving the animal for Christmas dinner, and she charged me five pounds for it.

[4] The word is pronounced ndraunikau, the Fijian n being sounded before the d, as usual. For convenience I spell it draunikau.

[5] The History of Melanesian Society, by W. H. R. Rivers, describes the fantastic genealogical tabus on marriages inside the family line.

[6] Rotumah is one of the steppingstones of the ancient Polynesian Invasion, over 1,000 miles from Rennell. See Part Two, Chapter II.

[7] Described in Part II, Chapter I.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.