Abstract
The extent to which illness, disease and other bodily afflictions are socially constituted and culturally interpreted is a source of unending fascination to anthropologists. In considering aspects of medical pluralism in Goodenough Island, this chapter documents the influence of ideological factors on traditional curing and the use of modern health facilities. The core of the chapter is an examination of statistical data on in-patient and out-patient treatment at two health centers on the island. Some unexpected patterns emerge with regard to the health care bestowed on children, patterns which are highlighted by a comparison of the records from the two centers, one government and the other mission established. The peculiarities of these patterns are, I suggest, best explained by the patrilineal social ideology of villagers in the one case, and the paternalistic social ideology of the missionaries in the other.
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Notes
This chapter is based on research conducted on Goodenough Island in May-June 1980, though it incorporates observations made on earlier field trips amounting to 26 months during 1966–68, 1973 and 1977. I am grateful to the Australian National University for funding these periods of research. The second half of the chapter is an expansion of a paper published in the Papua New Guinea Medical Journal (Young 1981).
That there are problems of undernutrition on Goodenough is evident from the figure of 7% for the proportion of children (N = 1852) under 60% weight for age (NMGR 1980).
Whooping cough spread from Cooktown, Queensland, in November 1899. Dysentery was also reported in the Eastern Division (i.e. Massim area) that year. One of the few precise mortality figures concerns the Trobriands, where 37 deaths occurred in a period of 8 weeks in a village of 250 people (BNGAR 1899–1900: Appendix 0). The following year the famine had eased, but “whooping cough here, [i.e. Eastern Divison] as elsewhere, had made sad ravages in the population” (BNGAR 1900–01: xxxiii).
According to a study conducted in 1980: “nasal carriage rates of S.pneumoniae and H.influenzae observed in Kalauna Village are the highest reported for open communities anywhere in the world” (Gratten et al. 1981: 177). Streptococus pneumoniae was isolated in 16 of 25 adults (64%) and in 36 of 37 children (97%).
In 1967, using a census checklist of Kalauna and several knowledgeable informants, I determined that 33% of the village population was visibly infected with tinea im-bricata.
Cf. Fortune (1963: 136), for a similar conception in the Dobu area. Tauwau is the mythological creator of the white race, European artefacts, and epidemics: “Any white man may be referred to as tauwau, a bearer of introduced diseases.”
“Blood” disease is found in Dobu (Fortune 1963: 179–80) and Duau (Roheim 1954: 491), as well as in Molima (Ann Chowring, personal communication) and Tubetube (Martha Macintyre, personal communication).
See Young (1983b, Chapter 9), for a biographical account of Kalauna’s most notorious curer-sorcerer of the past decade.
The measure of hospital size by number of “beds” does not accurately convey the capacity of a local hospital or health center, since many extra patients can be accommodated by laying mats on the floors. I do not know what the maximum capacity of either Bolubolu or Wailagi might be. If the Wailagi in-patient figure for 1974 is correct at 897, then at a conservative estimate of two days’ admission per patient, an average of 37 patients a day were being accommodated that year. It is highly probable that when Wailagi was hospitalizing so many children between 1962 and 1974, it was also discharging them within a day or two.
There is also the cynical possibility that the Wailagi sisters were deliberately aiming to “maximize the body count” to justify requests for further funds or facilities. I have not a scrap of information to support this, however.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
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Young, M.W. (1989). Illness and Ideology: Aspects of Health Care on Goodenough Island. In: Frankel, S., Lewis, G. (eds) A Continuing Trial of Treatment. Culture, Illness, and Healing, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2731-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2731-5_5
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