Another important experience I had in medical school was, I had always, I had never been in the tropics, and I... the literal of my imagination, you know, the coastline of my imagination, the shore was based on all the books that I read. I'm a... I’m a sort of a son of the Carnegie Library system, I used to, you know, go in, withdraw six books, and come back a week later and get another six, and that's what many of my friends did too. So I read a lot and then I... I went to the movies, and I was a theatre usher, that meant I saw... they used to have theatre ushers, you know, people who took you to your seat. And I’d see the same movie, you know, ten, fifteen times, I could recite the whole text, you know, the whole script. But the movies of that period were very kind of moral, very uplifting, very, you know, they were filled with adventure, discovery and... and the good guys were really good guys, you know. There was a much... there’s a much different ethical or moral tone, you know, to the contemp... where you have heroes who are not righteous, you know, in a lot of ways. So I wanted... I’d read a lot of books about the... about the tropics and... and about explorations, I'd read a lot of books on travel exploration and decided that I'd like to go and work in the tropics, so I spoke to our professor of parasitology there; we had a very good course in tropical medicine. When I went to medical school many of our teachers had been in the military and a lot of them had been in the South Pacific, some in Africa, and they knew a lot about tropical medicine. So we had a very good course on that and a pretty good course on public health. So I asked him if he had some suggestions and he right way said, ‘Well, I have been consulting on the treatment of... of filariasis in... in Suriname’. Now Suriname is a... is a country in northern South America; it's between Guyana and French Guiana and at that time is a Dutch colony in 19... that would have been 1949 or thereabouts. And there was a... it was one of the main suppliers of bauxite ore during the war and actually in... in '49 it was a major supplier as well. They had a big open-pit mine in several locations, but the one that I went to was in a place called Moengo, M-O-E-N-G-O, and that was on the Cottica River so it... it was about a day's journey by... by launch. They had this beautiful, you know, motor launch with a canopy, with fringe on it, you know, a fairly good-sized ship. There were no roads, there were no railroads, and there was no airstrip and there were no helicopters in... in those days, so if you wanted to get there, you either paddled in a canoe, or went on one of these launches. But it was also an ocean-going port; they can take 7000 ton war boats right up a hundred plus miles up the Cottica River. So I worked there for about... for two months... about two months, three months maybe, and it was a... it was a great experience. First of all, I mean, it was... it was high bush, it was impenetrable jungle. There were very few walking paths actually and if you did, you always, you know, you had to cut... carry a machete and cut your way through, or better yet, have somebody else with a machete. It was... they have... they have these horrendous poisonous snakes, they have big ones like anacondas, you know, and boa constrictors, pythons, big... and crocodiles, caimans.
