“ME CUTTIM WIND, ME CUTTIM GUT!”
The conquest of pidgin cheered me up mightily; and I needed cheering.
Toward the close of the New Guinea campaign (October, 1921) I began to
realize more and more, through daily practice, that oil of chenopodium
was inadequate for the mighty job cut out for it. To do it justice,
it did remove worms, quantities of them. The standard method of
administering chenopodium was to starve the patient the night before
and give him a purge in preparation for next morning’s treatment,
which was 15 minims, given at two-hour intervals, at 6 A.M., 8 A.M.
and 10 A.M. This was followed by another purge at noon, and he was not
permitted to eat until the purge had taken effect.
In North Queensland I had found that even these heroic measures had not
reduced the rate of infection, because the people were not taking the
drug. Then I decreed that no treatment would count unless inspectors
stood by and saw the medicine swallowed. In the early morning hours
one could get track of a treatment unit by the sight and sound of
front doors bursting open and children running wildly down the street.
So I decided to modify the dose by one half, followed by a purge.
Re-examination showed somewhat better results.
Old-timers who ran the standard chenopodium campaigns were unsung
heroes, and the grinding disappointments drove many good men out
of public health work. Examination, treatment, re-examination and
retreatment--repeated half a dozen times in any given area--made up
a method so extremely slow that by the time work in one region was
completed the unremoved female worms had again laid eggs inside our
patients; eggs which fell with the excreta to infect the soil once more
and permit another horde of larvae to crawl back to the human intestine.
When Colonel Honman at last drafted my services and put me in charge
of the native hospital at Rabaul, I was given an ideal chance to
experiment and observe. Groups of native patients were chosen and
locked behind barbed wire; each was given his dose and a gasoline can
for his stools. The latter were washed every twenty-four hours for
three days, and the worms counted. After an interval each man would
be given a very large dose to remove the remaining worms, so that a
percentage of effectiveness of the first dose could be estimated.
We tried various combinations of chenopodium: thymol, betanaphthol,
even betel-nut (which has a certain degree of vermifuge action). We
studied the relation of purge and drug, to find out on what ratio they
could be given. At best chenopodium was nauseous and produced many
severe symptoms like tingling toes, temporary deafness, vomiting; and
there was always the danger of profound poisoning inherent in the
powerful drug,--untrained dispensers might grow careless and omit the
purge,--and that might prove fatal.
To sum up chenopodium, it was about as popular as the Hammer and Sickle
at a Republican rally.
* * * * *
Taking charge of the native hospital, although it was added to my
duties in the field, was the job I liked best of all I had--new things
turning up every day, and plenty to swing to.
I swung to Colonel Honman with ever increasing faith, for he was
my mainstay when it came to an argument with Governor Wisdom. The
Governor’s troubles were piling up on him, and I never blamed him for
his stubborn spells. If Wisdom’s moods interfered with urgent medical
work, it was the Colonel’s delight to set his artificial teeth firmly
and jump into the scrimmage. He wasn’t afraid to go to the mat with the
Governor, and at the finish he usually came out winner. I cannot forget
his loyalty to me any more than I can forget a set of eccentricities
peculiarly his own.
Here is one of my favorite pictures of the Colonel in action. I was in
charge of quarantine while he was away, and always on the _qui vive_
for any alarm that might come in. Early one morning a disturbing cable
came: bubonic plague had broken out in Brisbane, and we must keep a
strict lookout for ships from that port. The Colonel was away, making
a trip around the group, so when the regular boat from Brisbane pulled
in I went aboard and talked it over with a worried skipper. How was he
to unload her? Certainly it would be inconvenient if he had to dump his
cargo on lighters and move it piecemeal to the dock. I saw his point,
and was wondering if I should take chances and let her come in before
dark, when I saw the Medical Chiefs ship poking around the heads. I
went over to it and found the Colonel in his pajamas. I asked him what
we were supposed to do about the caller from Brisbane. He hadn’t put
in his false teeth yet, and his mouth was sunken like a dead crater.
“Keep her out in the thtream,” he lisped. So I carried the orders back
to the Australian skipper, and went home to breakfast. But I said to my
wife, “Eloisa, I’ll bet that ship will be alongside the wharf before
noon.” It was; and I knew why. Down in the Australian’s hold there was
a new Ford sedan for the Colonel, and he wasn’t going to risk having it
unloaded on a lighter, away out in the stream.
Colonel Honman had his faults, but I grew to love and admire them, with
the firm belief that “even his failings leaned to virtue’s side.”
* * * * *
We had more and more cases of yaws sent in and were administering
intravenous arsenicals. The natives called these injections “needla,”
and it became a popular craze with them--a craze which spread over the
South Pacific. It was better than magic; a native would gladly have
anything poked under his skin through a needle, no matter what. In
Rabaul the native orderlies were always there on injection days; their
tongues hung out with eagerness to get a shot of any salvarsan solution
that happened to be left over. I have heard them arguing, “Why waste
that bully stuff on a lot of ignorant bush fellows who are no good to
anyone?” White men were queer in their preferences.
* * * * *
The primitive Melanesians have a holy horror of mutilation--except when
they mutilate their noses for decorative purposes, or their foreskins
from custom. The man who has lost an arm or leg is damned eternally,
for he must go to the local heaven armless or legless and be the
laughingstock of the gods. This belief is a nuisance to the surgeon
down there. A native with a gangrenous limb will fight against the
knife, tooth and claw. Slow and painful death by blood poisoning is far
preferable. Die with both your legs on and you can walk into Paradise,
a true man....
When a white man has anything artificial, like a glass eye, a realistic
wooden leg, or a set of false teeth, the back-country fellow looks upon
him as a miracle worker. One of the oldest stories along this line
originated in Papua--how the plantation manager took out his glass eye
and put it on a stump to glare at his lazy field hands while he was
absent; it kept the crew busy until a native genius thought of just the
right thing--he put a hat over the magic eye, and they all went back to
sleep.
Toward the end of my term in New Guinea a situation arose in a native
ward which compelled me to take advantage of this popular dread of
mutilation. Influenza had flared up on the plantations. The plague that
laid our soldiers low in American training camps had visited the South
Pacific also, in 1918-1919, and played havoc with these non-resistant
people. Since then, it had broken out sporadically; but health officers
had learned more about it and were holding it down better than before.
I had returned from the field and found the native hospital filled with
flu cases; many were dying in the collapse from pneumonia. The sudden
deaths among seemingly mild cases puzzled me, until I probed into the
cause. Our native attendants hated to lose sleep; as soon as they were
snoring, the sick men, hot with fever, would sneak out of a side door
and go down to lie in the sea and cool off under the stars. Then they
would sneak back to bed and die of shock.
I put a stop to all that. Native attendants had told them how I slit
open dead men’s bellies. (I had performed thirty-three postmortems to
determine the average native content of whipworms.) My ogreish fame had
spread among a simple folk who would far rather lose a life than a leg.
To them I was master of life and death--_and_ the postmortem table.
Therefore I profited by my foul reputation and marched through the
ward brandishing a large amputation knife, and as I passed along rows
of quaking cots I shouted: “Suppose you no stop along bed, you sons of
bitches, suppose you no takim medicine good feller, now you die finish,
me cuttim bell’ belong altogether, me cuttim heart, me cuttim wind, me
cuttim gut belong you feller. But suppose you good feller altogether,
now you die finish, me no cuttim you.”
Dark faces turned green. If they died in a state of disobedience their
bodies would go to butchery on the postmortem table; what chance would
their gutted souls have in a heaven where true men walk high, wide
and handsome?... After my threat they turned into completely docile
patients, and we had hardly a case of pneumonia when they were dying of
it elsewhere, all over Rabaul.
Twenty men in this ward had been rounded up and jailed for cannibalism.
I went to Colonel Honman and described an experiment I wished to
make. We all knew of Dr. Heiser’s brilliant success in the treatment
of leprosy. Chaulmoogra oil was no new thing; lepers had been given it
_by mouth_ for a couple of thousand years. When Heiser experimented
with it in the Philippines he didn’t change the remedy--_he changed the
method_. He tried chaulmoogra oil in intramuscular injections, with
tremendously improved results.
I didn’t expect to obtain any such startling effects. What I wanted to
know mainly was whether chenopodium acted directly on hookworms in the
bowel, or whether it was absorbed into the blood stream first and was
then ingested by bloodsucking.
The twenty cannibals were on the road to recovery from influenza,
and for experimentation Colonel Honman selected six who were heavily
infected with hookworm. They had already been condemned to hang as an
example to their outlaw village, so it didn’t matter whether the poor
devils died in bed or at a rope’s end. My plan was to try intramuscular
and intravenous injections of chenopodium.
The result proved harmless to the patients and surprising to the rest
of us. In our tests on three of the patients chenopodium was mixed with
camphorated oil and resorcin, following Heiser’s formula for preparing
chaulmoogra oil. These three men were given intramuscular injections
in this form, followed by purgatives, and their stools were examined
for a period of six days. From Case Number 1 we got only four hookworms
in five days; from Case Number 2 two hookworms and one Ascaris. But
Case Number 3 offered the main interest. To him we gave an intravenous
injection of chenopodium undiluted. After six days we had recovered
twenty-two whipworms and only three hookworms, although this patient,
like the other two, was heavily infected with hookworm. In Case 3,
then, injections of unmixed chenopodium had a far greater effect on
whipworms than on hookworms.
In the three who were given intravenous injections results were:
Case 1:--Hookworms: None. Trichuris: 11.
Case 2:--Hookworms: None. Trichuris: 19. Ascaris: 2.
Case 3:--Hookworms: None. Trichuris: 30. Ascaris: 2.
Our experiences with all six cases showed that injections of
chenopodium have little effect intramuscularly on hookworm, and no
effect on that parasite when given intravenously. But in both ways it
had a marked effect on trichuris.
Why was this? Obviously the answer must be in the habits of the two
parasites. The hookworm is a superficial feeder, sucking blood from
the surface of the gut. The whipworm has a very long head which he
buries half an inch into the intestinal wall; possibly he fed only on
lymph, which may have taken up a heavier charge of the chenopodium.
Ordinarily the whipworm is very resistant to chenopodium, as to all
vermifuges. Yet here he showed a high mortality to the drug when it
was administered through a new route. Whereas the hookworm, which
is affected by chenopodium given in the usual way, showed a high
resistance to it in the new method.
I had no time to continue experiments, which were interesting because
they were the first attempt to give anthelmintics by intramuscular or
intravenous injections, a new route for treating intestinal parasites.
Superficially at least, I had settled an argument which had arisen
among investigators with more claims to learning than my own. I had
established that the action of chenopodium is by direct contact with
the hookworm in the gut, not by absorption in the blood stream and
subsequent absorption by the parasite. The experimental cases showed
that fact clearly, and still more clearly revealed that chenopodium
in intramuscular and intravenous injections has a decided effect on
whipworm. For the latter there is no other satisfactory treatment. I
made these tests without the sanction of the Rockefeller Foundation,
whose letterhead should bear the motto, “We Do Not Experiment with
Human Beings.” When 61 Broadway learned of what I had been doing there
might have been trouble for me, but Dr. Maurice C. Hall, chief of the
Bureau of Animal Industry at Washington, became my advocate. In a later
chapter I shall have much more to say about this Dr. Hall: we are
indebted to him for one of the world’s great medical discoveries.
And by the way, my experimental cannibals never went to the gallows.
After leaving New Guinea I learned that another flu epidemic had struck
the hospital. I was rather glad that the six of them died in bed and
could go to the Happy Land with all their vertebrae in good order.
* * * * *
I hated to leave the native hospital, which had taught me so many
valuable things with which to carry on. I had been working in team with
the _lik-lik_ doctors and was more than pleased with the technical
progress they were making.
Nobody could have blamed Governor Wisdom if he had gone stark staring
mad under the pressure of territorial politics. He kept his reason, did
his work well, and was retired with a title. The white population was
more of a problem than the black; this new government was still in the
grab-bag period, every hand feeling out for a prize--anything from an
island to a fruit cake.
At one of the Governor’s receptions, the fine house on the hill was
all in party trim. At an end of the great hall there was a long table,
heavy with cakes, sandwiches and bon-bons. After a pleasant hour,
Eloisa and I were about to say good-by, but were waiting for our car to
drive up in the rain. A minor official’s wife sidled over to the big
table and said to Eloisa, “Look at those beautiful cakes. I’m going to
give a party myself tomorrow.” Fitting action to words, she slipped
an eighteen-inch fruitcake under her raincoat. We were at the door,
telling General and Mrs. Wisdom what a nice party it had been, when
the lady with the raincoat joined us. “Oh, Governor, such a lovely
time....” Her hand went out and the fruitcake slipped. _Splunk!_ it
messed all over the polished floor at the Governor’s feet. Still
holding his hand, she trilled, “I wonder where _that_ came from!” And
fluttered away to her car.
* * * * *
Our little house at Rabaul was a meeting and eating place for my
inspectors, drifting in from the field. For a week or two before we
left, the lot of them were at my table. In the kitchen their boys
gathered around Jerope, matching their tall stories against his.
We were a busy, uproarious family, getting ready to push on or say
good-by. We had added up our mileage for that New Guinea campaign:
9,958 for all of us, traveling on everything that would walk, pull
or float. My score was 3,523, not counting steamer trips to and from
Australia--and Beach came next with 1,893.
When young Byron Beach joined our farewell house party he looked like
a schoolboy fresh from tennis and a shower. He didn’t show a scratch,
although by all the laws of chance he should have been dead. For our
young adventurer had gone alone 165 miles up the Sepik River, a region
so wild and dangerous that only armed expeditions dared it in 1921, and
they came back with shuddering horror stories. Beach had tackled it in
a frail canoe, paddled by jittering natives--he wasn’t literally alone,
but he was the solitary white man. Beach had no business risking his
fool neck without a white companion. If he had waited for me I would
have joined him.
Almost his first act when he came to our house was to hand Eloisa £400
for safekeeping overnight. He grinned nonchalantly next morning when he
took the money back, and doubled it in a tortoise-shell investment. The
boy had heroic qualities, but he never forgot that he was a trader.
I wish I had the space to show you the diary he kept on that fantastic
trip. I had sent him up to inspect Father Kirschbaum’s mission, not far
from the wide brown mouth of that mysterious river whose upper waters
lie in the howling darkness of the unexplored. With the good Father
praying for his soul Beach set out on July 17, carrying plenty of tins
for hookworm specimens and blandly intending to offer his wares to a
jungle full of naked killers. The lad had the cheek of the devil, and
that probably saw him through.
Some of the villages were unexpectedly friendly. In one of them the men
were fiercely armed and hideously painted, awaiting another attack from
an enemy who had burned half their houses and carried away thirty-seven
villagers just before lunchtime. Beach distributed tins among these
people, and told them, through a scared interpreter, how to use them.
When the Sepik folk were good to Beach they let him sleep in a
Tambarand House, which is a tribal chamber of horrors, decorated with
the skulls of relatives and valorous foemen. Artists decorated the
family skulls to a semblance of life, and the good tribesmen took them
to bed with them.
The natives were disappointed when they found that Beach’s specimen
tins did not contain red paint for sale. Some of them punched holes
through the tins and hung them around their necks. He had to scold them
for this.
There were days of paddling into queerer and queerer regions. Time and
again Beach saw headless corpses floating down stream. Probably they
were the bodies of relatives; enemy meat would have been otherwise
disposed of. In another village, bristling with spears, Beach made so
bold as to prick a boy’s finger for a blood test. At sight of blood
the warriors began to howl like wolves, but Beach was there with his
everready salesmanship. He smiled winsomely as he presented the tribe
with a collection of mirrors and fishhooks. As he wrote in his diary,
“I’ll say I was thankful. Things were almost jolly when I left.”
At Timbunke, twenty-five miles farther up, it wasn’t so jolly. On the
shore was a reception committee of 200 painted devils, brandishing
spears and yelling at the top of their lungs. “I tried not to be in a
hurry getting back in the canoe,” he wrote, “but the boys paddled for
their lives, with all that bellowing mob scampering along the shore.
Perhaps they were just wishing me a safe journey. No white man has ever
slept there.”
All along it was playing poker with death. A fire on the shore might
mean that friendly people were guiding your canoe to a safe landing. Or
it might mean that the oven was heating up for a neighborhood roasting.
Beach visited dozens of these places, and in most instances carried
away the specimen tins, properly filled. Some of the villagers were
timid, in deadly fear of their neighbors; others were so dangerous that
Beach never let them get behind his back. In one of the tamest villages
he was knocked down--by an earthquake. At the tip end of his journey
165 miles up the Sepik, he scored his triumph. He cajoled a warrior
into submitting to the whole treatment, and recovered 105 worms.
On his swing back, he revisited some of the spots which had seemed
especially hostile. At Moim, for instance, he had used his diplomacy,
plus a liberal gift of gimcracks, and distributed 95 tins. When he
returned a few days later he got them all back in good order. On August
11, after having his canoe swamped in a gale, he reached the mouth
of the Sepik and paid off his canoe boys. They charged him thirty
shillings apiece, and Beach rounded off his diary by saying that it was
no trouble at all to handle the Sepik natives, if you used a little
common sense.
Well, the young cub got back to me, smiling and cheerful. It was a mad
trip, but I rather envied him the adventure. I think its outstanding
feature was Beach’s nonchalance in returning to the savage villages and
collecting the tins he had left behind.
Now about that roll of £400 which he left in Eloisa’s keeping, just
overnight. I learned about that later. In approximately three weeks of
voyaging to hell and back, he had found time to shoot down a collection
of birds of paradise which he sold to a handy trader somewhere on the
way home. I sometimes wonder if poaching didn’t motivate that fearless
voyage.
Byron Beach left me as picturesquely as he had come into my life. One
fine afternoon, off the Solomon Islands, he sailed into the sunset in a
trim little schooner that he had borrowed for the joy ride. He had also
borrowed a trim little native girl. Neither Byron, boat nor beauty ever
came back to that port, or any other that I know of. But I am inclined
to believe that wherever he landed he landed on his feet.