Evening Star Newspaper, February 2, 1930, Page 102

1930. THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 2, -%El Capitan™ Dickey in a South American Revolution. Fighting Yellow Fever and Smallpox Amid a Ghastly Machete Warfare—A Colombian Silver Mine and the Hospital at Barranquilla. By Herbert Spencer Dickey, M. D., In Collaboration IWith Hawthorne Daniel. EDITOR’S NOTE: Put your finger almost anywhere on the map of South America and you will be safe in saying, Dr. Dickey has been there. Throughout his amazing and varied experiences, he has been able to retain an unusual sense of humor and to brighten what other- _wise would often be a dark and [rightful chronicle. This article -is the first of an unusual series. N recent years I have given up the practice of medicine, turning my at- tention, instead, to exploration. Since I left the employ of the Guayaquil & Quito Railway, in 1925, my wan- tlerings in South America have been those of an explorer, and no longer do my various moves suggest merely that I am out of a job and in Search of a livelihood. I find, however, that there is a widespread belief among those not experienced in explora- tion, that explorers are forever having adven- tures—that they live lives of melodramatic ex- citement—that they are forever looking about for dangers, perils, risks, hazards. And this, sad to relate, is far from true. Now and then, of course, some explorer steps into adventure .to his chin, but I venture to say that that rarely has happened because of any desire of his own. It is the purpose of explorers to ex- plore—not to have adventures. The more se- rious ones are after information, not after dangerous situations. Now I am 30 years older than I was when Arst I went to South America, and because of that am much more inclined to be conservative. That is human nature. But more than that, I know more than I did. B’OUTH, of course, is much more likely to have adventures than is maturity. And that has been my case exactly,. When I was & juvenile and itinerant doctor wandering about the interior of South America, adventure, while it did not dog my footsteps, did meet up with me rather more often than enough. ‘That I went to South America in the first place was a matter of chance. Having just become an M. D., with a tightly rolled sheep- skin to prove my claim to that great eminence, I decided to make an effort to obtain a posi- tion as surgeon on board some passenger ship or other in order that the salt breezes of the bounding sea might blow a little strength into my frame, which had never been remarkable for excessive stamina. I did not obtain the position for which I was searching, but I was, finally, offered free trans- portation on a freighter to Jamaica, and at the same time obtained a letter of introduction ffom the Colombian consul general in New York to the general commanding the forces of the Republic of Colombia then in the field against the. revolutionary Liberals. Such a let- ter, I was assured, was tantamount to a com- mission as captain in the medical corps of the Colombian army, and with that I decided that I should bé content, especially as I had $100 in gold, in addition to the pass to Jamaica. That I did not know exactly how to get from Jamaica to Colombia was, at the moment, a minor problem, and I consequently bade fare- well to my family in Highland Falls, N. Y., from which in all my life before I had never traveled farther than a few hundred miles, and on Christmas eve, 1899, arrived in Brook- lyn, there to search for the freighter Erna, upon which I was to embark to make my for- tune. I had never before been away from home on Christmas eve, and when I found that the ship, which I had imagined would be a hive of activity making ready to depart, was, in reality, deserted by every member of her crew ‘save only a watchman, my heart grew numb. I had been told that the Erna was to sail at 6 am. Christmas day, and now I could learn mothing about her plans, for the watchman, left alone with several bottles of gin, had con- sumed what he could and was sprawling, with his head buried in his arms, across the dining room table in the compartment that, for lack of a better term, was named the saloon. Sterterous puffs of alcohol breath came from between his lips, but that provided me with no Wsformation save that he was temporarily out of this world, APTER I had spent a miserable night on a transom seat in the saloon—for I did not have the courage to pre-empt any of the state- rooms, fearful, as I was, that I might be routed out by the “bucko” mate—I dared not go ashore and walk to the lunch wagon for food lest the crew return and take the ship out during my absence. I shook the watch- man into half consciousness a dozen times, but he had no English, and his remarks, which 4 sensed rather than understood, seemed to by be highly derogatory and lacking in real in- formation. I did catch a stoker, once, on one of his periodical visits to the ship—to keep the fires up, I suppcse—and he told me, in fair English, that we were sailing “right away.” At 2 o'clock in the afternoon, when I had reached the point of sericusly considering the idea of returning to Highland Falls, where I knew that there would surely be some cold turkey and cranberry sauce left from Christ- mas dinner, the captain, the officers and the crew arrived. All were in a high state of alco- holic exhilaration and set joyously to sea. Six days later the Erna arrived at her desti- nation and fortunately for me I found a Nor- wegian cattle steamer that took me to Puerto Colombia. The war that was going on was no comic opera revolution. It was a compound of - ghastliness and horror and untrustworthiness, For four years it raged and in that time 250, 000 people perished. Towns were razed. Every crime on the calendar was a matter of almost dally record. Yellow fever killed thousands. Starvation or near starvation affected whole districts. Business declined. Morals seemed almost to have been utterly forgotten. Just where the current notion of South American revolutions originated I cannot imag- ine. Why it is that so many people imagine that the opposing armies just squib off their muskets and then call the battles over is too much for me. Of course, there is probably no worse shot than the average revolutionary South American. But they have other means of kill- ing their enemies—or those whom they ccnceive to be their enemies—than with guns. Practi- cally every man in Colombia, for instance, car- ries a machete. These heavy, sword-like knives have blades from 18 inches to 3 feet in length, They are heavy and sharp, and, except for the fact that they are usually single-edged, they are not greatly different from the short sword that was used so effectively by the Roman legions in their conquest of the world. At Barranquilla, which was a sort of con- centration point for the Federal army, I got a commission as a medical captain almost by asking for it. I assumed, in my youthful ignorance of Co- lombian army affairs, that I would be put on the pay roll. I had no idea what to expect in the way of pay, but anything would do, so I asked no questions and plunged into work at a makeshift hospital. Fifty or sixty poor devils lay there amid the clouds of swarming flies in that dim and evil smelling place and every one of them had yellow fever. It must be remembered that this was early in 1900. Already, as a result of the American occupation of Cuba, a suggestion had been made that mosquitoes were responsible for carrying the dread disease, but that theory had been laughed to scorn by all but a handful of thoughtful men. And here was I—a youth who knew nothing even cof the mosquito theory— who had never treated a case of yellow fever in my life, nor even seen one—called upon to at- tend the dying struggles of a building full of pitiful, ignorant, fever-ridden “voluntarios.” Tmlnc were no hospital attendants, and the place was almost a constant pandemoni filled with the mumbling of delirious pnue:lt..;.. the shrieks of the dying, and the constant series of cries for “Agua! Agua! Por el amor de Dios!” For three months I threw myself into that terrible task with all the strength that I could muster. It mattered not at all that we knew nothing of how to cure yellow fever. We do not know yet. Now we can prevent it, it is true, but even today, in many places in South America, the patient ill with the disease is trented much as we treated those poor devils, more of whom were brought in to us every day from the barracks of the city. At times we had as many as 200 soldiers at - once, and dozens—scores—of these died every day. Then two of my colleagues sickened and died. Two more—young chaps from the inte- rior, just as ignorant of this dread disease as I—were brought to take their places. One night three months later as I stood at the hospital door, a sick man was being carried in shrieking. It was a usual sight. His words were usual. But this night the words burnt into my heart. “Not to the hospital,” he was crying. “Por el amor de Dios, not to the hospital! They'll kill me there.” I stood aside as they brought him in and dropped him rather abruptly on the brick floor, where he still moaned and cried out against being left in that ghastly place. I knew the dread of hospitals that ignorant people often have, but I suddenly wondered whether or not we were Kkilling these poor devils. We did not know the cause of the disease, and more than that we knew no cure. Lime juice and castor oil were all we ever gave them. We sometimes prescribed other medi- cines, but we couldn’t get them, so our pre- scribing went for naught. Sometimes we couldn’t even get lime juice and castor oil. But it suddenly dawned on me that, despite our labors, which sometimes kept us busy with My cook was shot right in the soup tureen as she was bringing that steaming utensil from the kitchen to the dining room. those dying wretches from sunrise to midnight and beyond, we had done very little good. Had we actually done harm? Certainly the cura- tive powers of our treatment were slight when more than 80 per cent of our patients died. It flashed through my mind, then, that our treat- ment might actually be adding to the toll. I know now that castor oil and lime juice are just about as good as anything else for a yellow fever patient. There really isn't any cure of which we know. One can only be careful and hope. But in those days we knew nothing about the disease, and the wonder is that any one survived. Then an order was issued stopping the ar- rival of new troops. For about a week new cases continued to arrive as they had been ar- riving for three terrible months, and then, very abruptly, the numb:r dropped. Within two weeks only an occosional new case developed, and shortly thereafter the disease was prac- tically eliminated. So overworked had I been during that deadly epidemic that I had had little time to think of my own problems. I had not even taken an opportunity to ask for the pay that I had as- sumed I would get. But now, with our work so suddenly and greatly diminished, it occurred to me that I had better collect my three months’ back pay. I never collected. The general who had ap- pointed me a “captain” had disappeared, and that I was an officer in the Colombian army was something that I could not prove. At least I could not prove it with sufficient clarity and force to make it possible for me to collect what- ever salary it was that I should have had. This was a real blow, but, quite by accident, I learned, during my unsuccessful attempt to get that imaginary back pay, that the Tolima Mining Co., Ltd., a silver mine in the interior, needed a doctor. Consequently I wrote to the manager of the mine, and waited impatiently for his reply. Even today mail does not travel at breathless speed in most parts of South America, and in 1900 it was, if anything, slower. Furthermore, my letter had to go by boat up the Magdalena River, through a land that was a bone of con- tention between the Conservatives and the Liberals. The result was that I waited two months for a reply, and in that time reduced my small store of funds still more. But when the reply came it was, to my great delight, favorable. I was told to report as soon as pos- sible at Frias, which lies well in the interior, in the mountains to the west of Bogota. When 1 arrived at Frias I found that the Tolima Co. employed about a thousand men, who, together with their families and various hangers-on, made anything but a small com- munity—especially from the viewpoint of one young physician whose task it was to attend the sick and injured of the entire place. Most towns of 2,000 population boast more than one doctor, but I was alone at Frias and was, con- sequently, very busy indeed. I did manage, however, after I grew accustomed to the work and the vicinity, to build up enough private practice to pay my expenses, thus making it possible for me to have my pay check sent from London direct to a bank in the United States. The revolution was going on, of course, throughout Colombia during all this time, but at Frias there was an opportunity for both sides to have a particularly delightful time. On one side of the mine there was an enormous hill that seemed to be regarded by the warring parties as more or less inviolate Federal terri- tory. Directly across the valley stood another hill of about the same size that, obviously, was a rebel fortress whenever they cared to hold it. Often one hill was held by a force while the garrison of the other was absent, but more often than enough both hills were garrisoned. ‘Then a “battle” took place. My house was often in the direct line of fire, and I lost a goodly portion of the shingles from my roof. On one occasion my cow was killed. On another my cook was shot right in the soup tureen as she was bringing that steaming utensil from the kitchen to the dining room. My chickens died from a strange ail- ment which my houseboy diagnosed as lead poisoning caused by their enormous appetites for the lead bullets they picked up in the yard. I have often stooped as low as possible and dashed from the house to the hospital amid & veritable hail of lead, and once, while I was doing that very thing, a bullet passed through the sleeve of my coat without touching my arm. Excm for these periodic and rather casual “battles” that took place over our heads, the revolution did no harm, at least for some months after my arrival, and before either side grew courageous enough to come to grips with the other in our vicinity, a wandering poncho peddler, who came, he said, from Bogota, ar- rived with a number of woolen ponchos for sale. Some of these were not new. Where he got them is, so far as I am concerned, a mystery, but it is not unlikely that they origie nated in some hospital or some soldiers’ cone centration point where smallpox was preve alent. At any rate, shortly after his arrival and just before he had scld out his small stock to our peons, the fellow became very ill. Natue rally, no native thought of bringing him to me, and he associated, of courss, only with the natives. The result was that he had been very sick indeed for several days before word of it reached my ears. And even then I was not perturbed-—until I visited him and made a diagnosis. That he had smallpox was obvious even to my inexperience, and that he had been living among those two thousand natives for a week or more made it rather plain that the disease would not end there. Nor was I wrong. ‘The second case appeared promptly enough, of course, but it, too, was well developed before I was told about it. To make the matter worse, the man who came down was one who had & stall in the little plaza where he sold vege- tables. , From then on cases developed rapidly, and I shortly realized that I had an epidemic on my hands—an epidemic, furthermore, of the confluent kind, known sometimes as “black" smallpox. It is a very terrible disease with high mortality. By now we were completely cut off from Honda, our base of supplies, and all the vac- cine we had was two years old and useless. Our only hope, then, was to isolate cases as soon as they appeared, in order to prevent, as much as possible, the spread of the disease. Every hygenic method of which I knew was put dinto immediate effect, but the epidemic was with us. It was not hard to convince the men that isolation was essential, but the mothers, whose children developed the disease, were quite an- other matter. They wept and struggled. They shricked and fought. One woman, early in the epidemic, attacked me furiously when I proposed taking her child from her, and almost blinded me. She ripped my face with her nails from m¥ forehead to my chin, and there- after I visited my cases with two guards armed