17 h 51 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does it take to fight disease across beautiful islands where doctors and money are scarce?
In A Yankee Doctor in Paradise, American physician S. M. Lambert takes you through the South Pacific as both doctor and traveler. Working for the Rockefeller Foundation, he joins the effort to fight diseases that weaken island communities. Villages, harbors, and mission stations become the setting for a small team's work, where protecting health means reaching far beyond a single patient.
The task demands more than medical knowledge. Lambert works with chiefs, teachers, missionaries, and local helpers, learning that courtesy and trust matter as much as skill. His memoir mixes adventure and humor with accounts of parasites, skin diseases, and other illnesses. Throughout, his outsider's view reveals both the promise and the limits of outside help.
What you’ll discover
- A physician on the move Follow Lambert through island villages, harbors, and mission stations as he carries out his medical work.
- Beyond the beautiful scenery Look past the islands' beauty to the sickness that shapes daily life for many islanders.
- The work of trust See why a village's cooperation matters as much as the knowledge a doctor brings.
- Adventure beside hard facts Find humor and travel alongside a working physician's direct account of disease and care.
- An outsider's hopes and limits Consider Lambert's faith in science alongside his sense of what outside help can achieve.
Who will love it
Readers who love travel memoirs, island history and true tales of medicine in far places. It suits anyone curious about the Pacific, tropical disease, missionaries and the lively voice of an American abroad.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A tanner's son is sent to Papua
- Hookworm and a campaign for privies
- Ghosts, planters and mountain trails in Papua
- A month with the Fathers of the Sacred Heart
- Pidgin, cannibal patients and the Sepik
- A cleaning fluid saves the campaign
- Sorcery, curses and the scattered islands
- The Central Medical School at last
- Rennell Island and the fate of a people
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Read and hear A Yankee Doctor in Paradise in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
A Yankee Doctor in Paradise
by S. M. Lambert · 1941
A doctor in Fiji picks up a forgotten bottle of dry-cleaning fluid and gambles it on four patients.
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In short
A big American doctor stands in a New York office in 1918 and hears he is going to Papua. He has to look it up in an atlas.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A tanner's son is sent to Papua
Lambert opens in 1918 in the office of Victor Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation's Director of the East. Heiser announces Papua as if it were across the street. Lambert knows only vague talk of palm islands and cannibals who ask guests how they like their missionary.
He then tells how he got there. He is a tanner's son from Little Falls, New York, schooled at Hamilton College and Syracuse Medical, where his eyes begin to fail. Eloisa Tays, a mining engineer's daughter, tells him to finish his degree and come back with a practice. She waits five years.
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What is A Yankee Doctor in Paradise about?
It is the memoir of S. M. Lambert, an American doctor who spent twenty-one years fighting hookworm, yaws, malaria and leprosy across the South Pacific for the Rockefeller Foundation, and who helped create a medical school for islanders.
Who was Dr. S. M. Lambert?
Sylvester Lambert was an American physician who worked in Mexico and Costa Rica before joining the Rockefeller Foundation. He led health campaigns in Papua, New Guinea, Fiji and other groups, then retired in 1939 because of failing eyesight.
What is the Central Medical School in the book?
It is a school in Suva, Fiji, that trained islanders as Native Medical Practitioners. Lambert pushed for it for years. It opened in 1929 with students from Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, the Cooks, the Solomons and the New Hebrides.
The author
S. M. Lambert
American physician and memoirist
S. M. Lambert, who died in 1947, was an American physician trained at Hamilton College and Syracuse Medical. He practiced in Mexico and Costa Rica before joining the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board. For twenty-one years he worked in the South Pacific, mostly from Suva in Fiji, where he helped found the Central Medical School and the Mokogai leper colony.
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