A Yankee doctor in paradise

Papua? Where was Papua? Vainly I fished for scraps of geography and pulled up impressions of palmy islands where black warriors asked guests how they liked their missionary, rar...

It was early May, 1920, before I saw the sterile hills and corrugated iron roofs of Papua’s capital, Port Moresby. As they traveled in those days it would have taken the ordinar...

Only a day by motor lorry from the galvanized iron of Port Moresby, and untamed Papua was pressing around us--a brute that could throw sudden tremendous cliffs into tangled dryl...

On those first short trips our main effort was to count and report the diseased. I often had a deep sense of personal guilt when I left the villages just as I had found them, cr...

In July I decided to lead my own expedition as far into the interior as possible and get a proper picture of infestation in districts remote from the influence of white traders...

In Papua the dryest statistician might easily burst into the literary style of Sinbad the Sailor. At the time of year that folks back in Utica call “autumn” I had traversed grea...

I can’t pass Tepusilia by without mentioning the lone policeman there. Because his house was the only clean one, I was glad to sleep in it. He sat in a chair not quite wide enou...

Rounding the northern edge of the great island you come upon the Territory of New Guinea, which was German New Guinea until 1914, when Australia took it over. To simplify the co...

At last the time came when my vanity was tickled to the verge of hysteria; I had actually learned pidgin English. To the native English is pidgin, and if you do not speak it wit...

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...

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...

New Guinea was my jumping off place for the Solomon Islands, and “jumping off” well describes my first trip around that great island chain. I had only a few weeks to work in, an...

I have such a collection of hurricanes that in self-searching moments I call myself “The Storm King’s Target.” The wind that blew us around an island, that time we were trying t...

I was a dog without a collar, medically speaking. Official Fiji had heard about the avaricious Yankee, planting himself on foreign soil to amass a dishonest fortune. In 1922 a l...

In Fiji we started out directly for cure and prevention, an active campaign. Chris Kendrick was still with me, my gem of the first water; Malakai was a newly discovered diamond.

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 some...

My share in the application of carbon tetrachloride had been a decided step forward for me, and I had spent two very busy years in Fiji, campaigning both for cure and prevention...

The Chief Medical Officer of the Tongan Islands was away on leave. Dr. Minty, his competent assistant and the only other medical officer on Tongatabu, called me in to assist in...

I only stretch the long-bow lightly when I say that Western Samoa’s political troubles began with a small medical problem and ended with a great one. Certainly the finish of the...

The Adventist pastor who had only two converts led me into a dark, gnarled jungle. With every step I was forced to remember that this was not Samoa with its kindly government an...

Before I take you into the Cook Islands, where our war on disease landed me late in 1925, I must deal briefly with Polynesia’s humane and thoughtful big sister, New Zealand. The...

I should be sloppily sentimental and call the scene which is to follow “My Dream Come True.” The dream had backed in a little crookedly, knocking over a few ideals and dumping a...

First let’s try to peg the story down to the spring of 1931, when I put a bottle of rare old brandy under my arm and went up a very New Yorkish elevator to see Mr. Raymond Fosdi...

Late in 1930, shortly before I broached the egg-and-brandy riddle to Mr. Fosdick, the beautiful yacht _Zaca_ pulled in at Suva. Templeton Crocker, who had inherited richly from...

... We are a little crowded, but not too much. _Zaca_ is beautiful; 118 feet long, 23 feet beam, 125 tons, 22 tons lead on keel, draws just under 15 feet of water. I have had my...

Again the great coral wall with its skimpy crown of trees; again the mysterious crack in the cliffs that marked Kungava Bay. Buia, who had acquired malaria on his trip, had been...

I don’t think that I am a sentimental man. I shouldn’t be, for my work has not been along sentimental lines, and daily routine should have tried all the sugar out of my system....

As the Pacific’s halfway house, Suva has become more and more of a stopping-off place for the great and the near-great. Royalty, inquiring novelists and scientific bigwigs have...