I thought about putting hookworm in the title and decided that was a bad idea.

I’ve been wandering through Project Gutenberg and found a story that I’m reading very slowly. It’s about a public health campaign I never heard of before, carried out with Rockefeller foundation money, in the tropics in the 1920’s. A Yankee Doctor in Paradise by S. M. Lambert, M.D. is a little odd, because it was published later than 1928, so I’m not quite sure why it is out of copyright. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74693/pg74693-images.html

Anyway, I read a little bit, the book gets too graphic about hookworm, I put it aside, then late in the evening when I should be headed for bed, I sneak back for another look. Lambert was an American doctor working in several places where the British Empire was nominally in charge, such as Tonga, Fiji, and New Guinea. I didn’t look up the politics of this. He states, right at the very beginning of his book, that all the British he met were quite generous with him, even though he was there being critical of the hygiene that was being practiced in their sphere of influence.

If you want to understand the life cycle of hookworm, this book will help. That’s not what I went and looked up, after reading a bit. In no particular order I looked up the Rockefeller foundation and their hookworm campaign, Wallace Irwin, and Victor George Heiser.

The Rockefeller campaign against hookworm in the early 1900’s is described in slightly off terms, in this story from the Rockefeller archives. https://resource.rockarch.org/story/public-health-how-the-fight-against-hookworm-helped-build-a-system/ Whether it means to or not the article seems to suggest that actually getting rid of hookworm was secondary to creating a public health system, which would have the purpose of working against hookworm — and other diseases. Bureaucracy is always a double-edged sword. Sometimes it can spread information and help very widely. Sometimes, preserving its own existence becomes more important than the reason for that existence. Reading about the foundation one hundred years later, at the same time as I read about an incredible success in the South Pacific was a little schizophrenic.

Dr. Lambert seems to have been the pioneer of a highly successful treatment for hookworm in the 1920’s. It also seems to be the case that hookworm is back, one hundred years later, and continuing to devastate those who contract the disease. It kills slowly and steals energy from those fighting it. Drinking carbon tetrachloride was the treatment that Lambert pioneered. The right amount works. The wrong amount kills.

Lambert mentions meeting William Irwin, a writer from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Lambert was thrilled to meet someone who had written stories that he enjoyed. The book that Lambert loved and specially mentioned, Letters from a Japanese Schoolboy was purportedly translated by Irwin but actually written by him. It was made into a silent movie in 1918. It was written, says Wikipedia, as a joke and at a time when Americans admired the Japanese for their conduct in the Russo-Japanese war. I have my suspicions about that book but it’s available on the Library of Congress website. I mention for extra context that the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin in DC were a gift from Japan around this time.

The greatest public health figure from the early 20th century was Victor George Heiser. He was an advisor to the Rockefeller public health campaign and, himself, worked on leprosy as well as other tropical diseases. Heiser wrote a book and Lambert mentions that Heiser discusses some of the campaign against hookworm that Lambert had been involved in during the 1920’s. That’s very involved. Let’s say that Heiser admired things Lambert did and Lambert returned the favor.

Heiser was a survivor of the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania. I had read about him in David McCullough’s book The Johnstown Flood. The opening chapter of Heiser’s book, An American Doctor’s Odyssey: Adventures in Forty-Five Countries is a description of his experience at the age of sixteen, watching his mother and father, and three thousand other people, die in that flood, while he survived. This first chapter of the book is available to read, on the Johnstown Flood Website. https://www.jaha.org/education-materials/flood-museum-materials/survivor-story-victor-heiser/ It is an incredible piece of writing, about an incredible experience.

… my boyhood home was crushed like an eggshell …
… I leaped into the air at the precise moment of impact …
… before the the house gave way completely, another boiled up beside me …

Lines from Heiser’s chapter on the Johnstown Flood.

Lots of food for thought and future reading here.