Goldfish and cocktails

Invincible Strangers 17 Chapter 5

Āpia town started as little more than a whaling camp, providing uneasy anchorage and liquor. From the 1880s, copra trading began. An eccentric range of Europeans, mostly men, settled around the bay. Medical care depended on Sāmoan plant based remedies and massage. For the whites, it was maritime quackery until, in 1880,  44-year-old Bernard Funk put out his medical shingle. He studied medicine before being conscripted into the Prussian Army as a surgeon. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 gave him a particular type of skill. A victorious and united Germany then suffered a wave of unemployment, pushing 800,000 people to emigrated, Funk among them. Cyclopedia of Sāmoa said of Funk that there was no more popular man in Sāmoa: ‘His familiar figure, cigar in mouth and cane in hand, may be seen on the beach almost any day.’ He preferred Sāmoan patients over whites as patients. He married Senitima, 26-years younger than him. In those days whites seldom married in Sāmoa. She learnt to speak excellent German and English and while her husband could be grumpy, she was known to all as friendly.

Bernhard Funk in his later years - Regionalmuseum Neubrandenburg

Money lender Thomas Dickson was among Funk’s early Āpia patients. Harry Moors described the outcome of what reads now like oedema, the result of congestive heart failure. Close to death, Funk helped him along, starting with croton oil. Poisonous and applied to the skin, it causes severe rashes and itching. Funk probably administered it to Dickson as an emetic to induce vomiting. Perhaps he was trying to purge poor Dickson’s intestines. It did not help.

‘As a final resort they poured two pounds (nearly a kilogram) of metallic mercury down Dickson’s throat,’ Moors says, ‘and his friends then walked him all about his rooms, to get action, but without result. Finally an instrument was used and Dickson’s intestines were tapped as if he had dropsy – this gave him temporary relief from pain, but he died the same night, and Funk recovered the mercury from the body.’ Moor spared readers details of quicksilver salvage.