Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [131]
Assisted by two orderlies, Slug Wright from the Lost Battalion and Robert Hanley from the Houston, Hekking ran the most challenging kind of solo practice. He devised some innovative remedies out of the jungle’s natural medicine chest. Certain types of leaves healed cuts. Long, saberlike legumes held beans that when crushed and boiled produced a tonic—“bitter as gall,” according to Don Brain, but useful in reducing fevers. Hekking’s knowledge of jungle ailments and natural remedies was encyclopedic. If Pack Rat McCone was resourceful in stitching wounds with safety pins and twine, Henri Hekking took lifesaving resourcefulness to the level of mysticism, if not near divinity. He knew that palmetto mold could be used like penicillin, that pumpkin could be stored in bamboo stalks, fermented with wild yeast, and used to treat men suffering from beriberi (it got them pleasantly drunk to boot). Tea brewed from bark contained tannins that constricted the bowels and slowed diarrhea. Wild chili peppers had all sorts of beneficial internal applications.
Hekking was supposed to report to British doctors who had been trained at the finest medical schools. Leery of native ways, they called him a witch doctor. Hekking had as little regard for their practices as they did for his. Because supplies of quinine were limited, he never prescribed it preventatively. He preferred to encourage the immune system to function, and administered the medicine only to fight an actual infection. He mixed beef tallow with acetylsalicylic acid to fight athlete’s foot, distilled liquid iodine by mixing iodine crystals and sake, and ground up charcoal and mixed it with clay, a remedy that absorbed intestinal mucus. Assessing a skeletal patient squirting his insides out from dysentery, he could see beyond surface appearances and determine its underlying nature, amoebic or bacillary. When more potent medicines became available—Captain Fitzsimmons procured some sulfapyridine tablets once—Hekking would be miserly and economical, shaving the tablets down and administering the shavings directly into septic wounds. He used gasoline for alcohol, kapok for cotton, leaves for bandages, and latex for an adhesive.
Doc Hekking thought the classically trained physicians were hopelessly out of their element. “It was most distressing to him,” Howard Charles wrote, “discovering how different their approaches were to the treatment of tropical diseases…. He was light-years ahead of these doctors.” One of Branch Five’s medical officers, Captain Lumpkin, who had practiced medicine in Amarillo before mustering for war, said that any doctor who trained in the jungle with the Dutch East Indian Colonial Army knew more about tropical diseases than the collective mind of the American Medical Association.
Hekking saw his patients as whole human beings and treated the whole man. “He was the first man that I ever heard of that treated a man as a unit,” said Slug Wright. “He claimed that man had to be cured two ways: the body is only a small part of it; the mind is important as well. So he cured the mind and the body together. He was using psychosomatic medicine.” Hekking sometimes turned around a patient in decline by intentionally angering him. He found that a rush of rage could be a lifesaving stimulant, even if the patient was in no shape to act out the impulse. Hekking inspired such confidence in his patients that even his placebos had powerful effects. He saved a different kind of placebo for the enemy. When Japanese soldiers came to him for help with venereal disease, he would send them to the native black markets to get the medicine he needed. When the medication was brought to him, he would set it aside for the prisoners and inject the Japanese with water. Sometimes he gave