A Yankee Doctor in Paradise

CHAPTER I. Short Notice for a Long Chore

SHORT NOTICE FOR A LONG CHORE

“Lambert, I’ve got a good one for you this time. I’m sending you to Papua.”

Dr. Victor G. Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation’s famous Director of the East, made this announcement as if Papua were across the street.

“That’s fine, Doctor,” I said, “perfectly fine.”

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, rare or well done.

Dr. Heiser sat behind a modest desk in one of the smallest rooms at 61 Broadway, delivering a sort of curtain speech to an act that had taken longer than a Chinese play, an act which had played through the war summer of 1918. I had finally found a successor and resigned my superintendency of the United Fruit Company’s hospital in Costa Rica; I was in New York to offer my services. But Uncle Sam wasn’t looking for medical officers with weak eyes.

Now Dr. Heiser’s kindly voice was praising and instructing one of the family, for at last I had joined up with the Foundation. There he was, kneeing his desk, telling me nothing about Papua, saying that my Costa Rican and Mexican experience had particularly fitted me for work with the International Health Board, not mentioning that war had taken away many of their physicians. He dwelt on the preparatory three months’ hookworm training I had already taken, under the Foundation’s auspices, among the hillbillies of Mississippi ... kept me moving, didn’t it, canvassing from door to door?... Lambert, you can work a lot faster down in the South Pacific, where you’ll lecture and treat in batches of from fifty to five hundred.... You’ll have to cover a lot of ground down there.... Take along plenty of khaki, and no evening clothes.... Get your family ready and start day after tomorrow.

“And on your way to Papua, Lambert, you’d better report to Waite, who’s in charge of our work in Australia. There’s quite a hookworm campaign going on in North Queensland. Good place to brush up on what you’ll need in Papua. You’ll find the Australians good fellows, like our Westerners, rough and generous and tolerant--they haven’t had to jam together in big cities and get small-minded.”

During our argumentative stage, I had told Dr. Heiser about a mining syndicate’s offer to take me down to Peru. I didn’t bring that up again, or mention General Gorgas’ half-promise to forgive my blinky eyes and commission me in the venereal section of the Medical Corps.

When I left that morning I was under the spell of the Heiser charm; a charm that has sent armies of scientific men, great and small, to follow jungle trails all over this planet, and work until they drop. In later years I walked with him along some of those trails, and my admiration for him increased every step of the way. There is a godlike something about Heiser that will never let him fall from the pedestal he deserves. Grant him clay toes if you wish, he is still a colossus who has bestridden the field of public health for twenty years--and been the target of much professional jealousy. In 1937 when I was at a League Conference in Java I heard an envious Yankee voice say, “Yes, I’ve read his American Doctor’s Odyssey, and I wonder why he didn’t call it Alone in the Orient.” Which gave me the luxury of a reply: “Did you watch him inaugurate public health work in the Philippines? Alone in the Orient describes it rather well.”

* * * * *

I found an atlas and looked up Papua. Rather dully I was informed that Papua lay on the southeastern edge of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world--the Australian Continent’s hottest neighbor, no doubt, since its northern shoulder jogged the equator. The extremely savage names of its numerous tribes, the aimless fertility of its soil, its wealth of gold, copper and pearls, struck only dull fire on my imagination. I was going to a place called Papua, not to flirt with rubber-bellied brunettes in grass skirts, but to search sensibly for yaws, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. And to rout out the hookworm as tamely as I had poked him up in polluted Mississippi.

That was 1918, when a trip to Paris and back was something to talk about. The armistice hadn’t yet sent back a million doughboys with a smattering of obscene French. The world cruise hadn’t risen as a major industry. Today any debutante who has sauntered around the globe can tell you more about Fiji fire-walking and Arabian sword-swallowers than anybody but a professional explorer knew then.

* * * * *

No, the hereditary Lambert is not a geographer. We are a homebody family, and I often wonder how the colonial Lamberts ever found courage to cross over from England to seventeenth-century New Jersey. They certainly stayed put when they got here; nothing but hunger and Indian raids could budge them. My father, who was a tanner and often used his best leather trying to teach me civility, was looked upon as something of a sea rover because he once drove mules along the Delaware and Hudson Canal towpath. Relatives in Ellenville, New York, where I was born, paled when they learned that Father was moving us to Little Falls.

Our pious Methodists always regarded Father as a freethinker; and wasn’t it like him to want Sylvester to be a doctor? Mr. Babcock, head of our Free Academy in West Winfield, was even more radical. A boy ought to have a college education before he started studying medicine. I had worked with the tannery gang long enough, and had learned too many of the rich, brown oaths they spat out with their chewing tobacco. Hamilton College was the place to smooth me out for medical school. Hamilton College! My mother’s hands went up at the spectral idea of a place so remote that Sylvester would have to go overnight, by train.

I entered with the class of 1903, and the thought of all my father sacrificed to send me there made me a rather earnest student--that, and his threat of more tannery, if I didn’t make good. I am thankful that Hamilton and the Syracuse Medical, which I later attended, were both small, for in small classes the instructor knows the needs and failings of every student. I was a hard worker, but not a grind. I found time for football, which toughened the tannery boy for harder years to come. Trips with the team to rival colleges were early adventures in foreign travel. Colgate, swollen with toothpaste money, was easy fruit for us then. Williams rubbed our noses in the mud to the tune of 4-0--and I wept, limping off the field.

Sometimes in my late middle age I awake from sleep swearing. I have been dreaming of a game with the Carlisle Indians. That big Injun, Red Water, is on the line opposite me, tall as a church, never losing his grin. The ball is snapped and his long arm reaches tenderly over me, gets the seat of my britches....

In 1904 I was prepared for Johns Hopkins, but Mother wanted to know what I’d be doing with myself, ’way over in Maryland. Syracuse was in New York State, anyhow, and that was far enough for anybody.

Syracuse had a faculty disproportionately large and able for so small an enrollment. The ideal of scholarship was Spartan; if a student’s nose roved from the grindstone it was pushed back again. The quizzes were little inquisitions, the recitations no place for a sleepwalker. To study under Elsner, Jacobson and Levy was to appreciate Jewish respect for scholarship. Dr. Steenson, of the Department of Pathology, had a time-keeper’s complex and you missed his eight-thirty bell at your own risk. We called him “Johnnie Cockeye,” for his devotion to the gonococcus germ. I stared through the microscope for interminable hours, seeing but little on the slides. My eyes were already going, but I could read easily. Before I came to class I knew, theoretically, what I was supposed to see under the glass--and that’s how I coped with Steenson’s sudden quizzes.

* * * * *

The very distinguished Dr. Frank William Marlow, graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, is dead now, but he crowned his career with a book called The Relative Position of Rest of the Eyes. A course under him put my eyesight, quite literally, on the blink. And this is how it came about.

Toward the end of my third year my brother became seriously ill, and I had to take him to Arizona. There I discovered, to my bald astonishment, that this Lambert had a wandering foot. In Tucson I obeyed a mad impulse and joined the crazy medical unit of a construction gang, working down the West Coast of Mexico. I had time to grow romantic when I came to the fine old hacienda of Mr. Eugene Tays, an American mining engineer. The dark eyes of his pretty daughter, Eloisa, melted my every ambition to go home and plug again at a stiff medical course. She was half Spanish, one of the influential Vegas around San Blas; but she had enough Scotch common sense to tell me to go home and graduate. When I had a practice of my own, she said, I could come back and marry her. She had to wait five years, but she kept her promise.

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