Medicine: Privies para Pedro

The Indians of Peru are deeply uninterested in quite a lot of things. Some of the things that fail to stir their interest: hospital care, cleanliness, antivenereal treatments, vaccination, privies. Nor were they much impressed, at first, by Dr. David Glusker, nor by the fact that Dr. Glusker had been an instructor in Medicine at Cornell Medical School before he joined the Army last February. (Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs had discovered that Dr. Glusker knew a lot about tropical medicine and Spanish and whisked him off to the Tingo Maria district of Peru.)

Tingo Maria Indians knew little about doctors but a lot about medicine men and the curative powers of drums when properly beaten. But drums sometimes get off beat. In such cases the Indians brought their sick to the hospital Dr. Glusker had run up in the Andean jungle. But they brought the drums along too, just in case.

The Tragedy of Mrs. Gomez. One day when 30 pupils at the local school, encouraged by their parents, refused to be vaccinated, Dr. Glusker knew he had to do something. What he did was to write a little story in Spanish, The Tragedy of Mrs. Gomez and Her Darling Daughter Serapia:

“When little Serapia was only three years old, she caught the disease called smallpox. . . . The poor child died in her mother’s arms.” Soon the grieving Mrs. Gomez was visited by a little bird that turned out to be Serapia. Said Serapia “I went to Heaven. Saint Peter told me that God was very worried because nobody should die of smallpox. He asked me if we had a doctor in the village. I told him that we had none. But not very far away in Tingo Maria there was a new hospital and they had a doctor and a nurse.”

” ‘Now I remember,’ said God, ‘that it was not finished when you were sick. All right, dear child. There is no reason why anyone should die of smallpox. I am inspiring the doctors to vaccinate everybody. Once vaccinated, they will be protected from smallpox.’ ” Serapia explained that immunization for diphtheria and scarlet fever could also save children’s lives and that it was her mission to tell other children’s mothers about it. The fable concludes: “Soon there will be no more disease. Because everybody will be vaccinated.”

Serapia did the trick: after reading her sad story, the children clamored to be vaccinated. Dr. Glusker, a gleam in his eye, went on to write a whole series of stories called Fabulas para Pedro (Fables for Pedro), a little boy who rarely passes up a chance to plug Dr. Glusker’s hospital.

Outburst of Excusados. A favorite Pedro story is the one about privies (in Spanish, excusados). One day Pedro went to a fiesta expecting a wonderful time. “Everybody was talking and shoving and bargaining. They sold and they bought. Everything was gay.” But as the village was crowded, many people “relieved themselves by the river and made a filthy dung heap All of them drank the water of the river and Pedro did too.” Soon Pedro got very sick, the priest made him go to the new hospital, where the doctors explained that he had dysentery from drinking impure water. They said that boiling makes the water pure. The story ends: Little by little people learned how to prevent dysentery. They built privies and they used them.” There was an outburst ot privybuilding in Tingo Maria.

Well pleased with the Pedro fables, the Coordinator’s office expects to use Dr. Glusker’s idea, if not his stories in other Latin American countries. (About 200 U. S. citizens from the coordinator’s office are now cooperating with over 12,000 Latin Americans in 18 countries to keep disease out of strategic areas.) The office suggests that a similar fable-and-folklore method might be useful among children in the U.S. itself.*

As for Major Glusker, he was promoted to head of a medical Field Party, and sent to pastures new in Costa Rica.

*WPA Despite labor, the U.S. construction of still needs 3,000,000 4,000,000 privies for by 16,000,000 citizens who have no sanitary arrangements whatever.