Put It in Your Hammock

SIAM DOCTOR (255 pp.)--Jacques M. May--Doubleday ($2.75).

Taoist Philosopher Lao-tse told the parable to his disciples:

"A man had a horse which ran away. When the neighbors came to express their sympathy the man said: 'Who knows what is good luck and what is bad luck?'

"A few days later his horse returned, bringing a herd of wild horses back with him. The neighbors came to congratulate him, and the wise man said: 'Who knows what is bad luck or good luck?'

"A few days later his son, seeing so many horses, took to riding and broke his leg; the neighbors came again to offer their condolences, but the man replied: 'Who knows what is good luck or bad luck?'

"It happened that a few months later a recruiting officer traveled through the village and commandeered ... all the boys of the son's age who were able to carry arms, but not the crippled."

French Surgeon Jacques May believes that this story--which "could continue indefinitely"--neatly sums up the Eastern attitude to life and fate. In Indo-China, where Surgeon May spent eight years of his life, his native assistant smiled when May postponed lunch to operate on an emergency case. To what end? the assistant asked. The patient was of the coolie class, too starved to live much longer anyway. And who could be sure that death was not better than life? "In these parts," the assistant told him, "we think human life has no value; it will be hard to persuade us that it has."

Surgeon May did his persuasive best. But Siam Doctor is no trumpet call to noble deeds; it is largely a winking kaleidoscope of Oriental reminiscences, studded with startling clinical notes. Dr. May found that just as tropical forests outgrow and outbloom Western vegetation, so do some diseases in the tropics flourish with a luxuriance that amounts to melodrama. An ovarian cyst, Annamite-style, has been known to weigh more than the half-starved body in which it grew. Hernias often achieve a size "so gigantic as to have lost all possibilities of residence inside the abdomen."*

From Bangkok to Hanoi, Surgeon May makes his rounds, trotting through an atmosphere of opium and betel nut, respectfully probing the innards of royal concubines, palpating a slew of Somerset Maughamish transplanted Europeans without whom the mysterious East would probably be far less mysterious. Stretched in their hammocks, patting on the suntan oil, most U.S. readers will gladly tag along with Dr. May.

* Conditions found, on occasion, in the cysts and hernias of Western man.

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