Ocean Wanderer

A student who was six weeks late for the opening of school sailed into Boston last week. Within 24 hours he was elected president of his class, and so became the guest of honor at a big beer party in the austere lobby of Harvard's dignified School of Public Health. The student was Dr. Thomas Robert Alexander Harries Davis, 34, of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, and few scholars ever had better excuse for being tardy. Dr. Davis had sailed 11,000 miles from New Zealand to the Charles River in his 48-foot ketch Mini, and had been beset by storms.

The son of a Welshman and a Polynesian noblewoman, Dr. Davis went to New Zealand when he was eleven. He got his M.D. in 1943, was a house surgeon in Auckland, practiced psychiatry in Dunedin and studied tropical medicine in Sydney before he went back to the Cook Islands with his New Zealand wife. There he found only eight health workers, none of them medical graduates, to care for 16,000 people on 15 islands. scattered over 300,000 square miles of the Pacific.

One of the biggest problems facing Dr. Davis was how to get around to make calls. He once flew 900 miles to help a woman who was having a difficult labor. Then an epidemic of spinal meningitis broke out on Atiu, one of the outlying islands. It was the hurricane season, and no commercial craft would risk the voyage. Dr. Davis borrowed a 35-foot sailboat and reached the island with a crew of volunteers. Ten people had died, and 100 were sick, but there were no more deaths after he went to work. "They have a different name for me on every island," says Dr. Davis, "but on Atiu I am known as 'Ocean Wanderer.' "

Like most Polynesians, the Cook Islanders have a high tuberculosis rate, but Dr. Davis has found that they seem to have developed a resistance like that of Europeans: they form scar tissue and recover. They also have hookworm, and filariasis (the "mumu" of South Pacific G.I.s), which may reach the stage of elephantiasis.

Dr. Davis has found his maternal ancestors a big help in persuading the islanders to stop spitting and defecating anywhere & everywhere. He has fitted sanitary habits into the complex Polynesian social code. But the people's health, he believes, is inseparably bound up with education and economics. So, while at Harvard, he is going to cram in all the sociology he can. Class President Davis will also, by his past and his presence, contribute something to School of Public Health seminars. Said a member of the staff: "We think Dr. Davis can bring to us as much as we can give him."

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