Overview

It has been a difficult, sometimes painful, story to tell in its entirety, but I have done my best to be accurate both in facts and in dates, for I feel that l owe the truth to the many who have become valued acquaintances, and sometimes friends. All these have constantly requested more news of my ""Green Dwelling"" and my discovery of a fatal neurological disease previously unknown to Western medicine. This book is for them, in lieu of letters that I ought to have written and did not. It is also my concern to produce innocent amusement, unrestricted by canon or precedent, for those who require some relaxation from the fatigue generated by so many parasitic forms of life in this less than perfect world. My peers, the medical scientists, who read this will realize that this book is neither a scientific treatise, nor a balance-sheet of all the achievements and failures of medical science, but a presentation of the major implications of the factors that continually determine our medical ethics - including some of the less prizeworthy drawbacks. 

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9780896031111

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Reviews

[A] swashbuckling romance of heroic adventure...A poetic description of the terrain and the inhabitants...Evocative...exquisite images of life in New Guinea ...A romantic account of the heroic age of medicine...Zigas enjoys the theatricality of an arresting story...An attention-getting style of writing...His appreciative description of one of his... assistants might well apply to himself: a great actor, an innocent liar of the most magnificent proportions, and hence very good entertainment. -The New York Times

[A] swashbuckling romance of heroic adventure...A poetic description of the terrain and the inhabitants...Evocative...exquisite images of life in New Guinea ...A romantic account of the heroic age of medicine...Zigas enjoys the theatricality of an arresting story...An attention-getting style of writing...His appreciative description of one of his... assistants might well apply to himself: a great actor, an innocent liar of the most magnificent proportions, and hence very good entertainment. - The New York Times

An often preposterous memoir of the events surrounding the identification of a rare form of encephalitis occurring in a New Guinea tribe - a feat that won a Nobel Prize for its chief researcher. In 1950, the author, who characterizes himself as a simple young man who knew very little and believed a lot, was an inexperienced medical officer assigned to provide health services to several stone age tribes in Australian New Guinea. With a smattering of anthropological background, a kind heart, elementary medical skills, and a romantic imagination, he became intrigued with a fatal disease that struck one particular tribe and that the natives attributed to magic. Although his own experience was limited, Zigas succeeded in interesting his superiors and eventually future Nobel Prize winner Carleton Gajdusek (Medicine, 1976). But for three-quarters of the book, Zigas himself is its hero; and the reader must slog through his eccentric, garrulous, muddy prose to get a glimmer of light on the scene he tries to describe and his role in it. Even so, there is something naive and endearing about Zigas, and when Gajdusek finally arrives to do the thorough study that won him the Nobel, Zigas pays him devoted though not always lucid tribute. Gajdusek himself writes what seems to be a reluctant foreword, calling these recollections of his helper historical fiction and assigning them a brand-new literary category: abstract expressionist ironical parody. Indeed, the book could pass for parody of a sounder medical-anthropological work, although this does not seem to have been the author's intent. There is the germ of a good movie here, about an innocent, idealistic young doctor trying to deliver some western medicine to a group of primitive peoples speaking 700 different languages - none of which he is fluent in - and who stumbles upon a disease whose formal identification has implications for other serious slow-developing vital infections. But as anthropology or medicine, it has very limited value; and as a lucid narrative, it has less. (Kirkus Reviews)

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