Note 3 — Chapter XIII

Some months later I did penance for that moment’s slip in courage. A learned man who had studied tropical medicine in London announced that the human hookworm could infect the pig and be carried by him. This was a serious claim, likely to upset all calculations; especially since he declared that he had proved his theory on a South Pacific island. I wanted to find out for myself, so I went to a friend whose wife had a pet pig that she had raised on a concrete floor to avoid that curse of Fiji’s swine growers, intestinal parasites. I examined the pig, found it negative, then hog-tied it and laid it, several times, on a bed heavily infested with human hookworm larvae. It got a severe “ground itch,” first symptom of infection. In due time I did a postmortem on the animal and found many abscesses in the liver and kidneys, but no worms in the intestines—fair evidence that human hookworms do not infect pigs.

Then I did the experiment in reverse: got a pig that was extremely heavy with pig hookworm and tied a poultice of the hatching material on my arm. Result: “ground itch,” but no infection. Showing, at least, that pig hookworm couldn’t thrive in a tough bird like me. I cut open this tender young pig, and a good look at its wormy insides sickened me. As a martyr to science I only suffered through my pocket. The lady had been saving the animal for Christmas dinner, and she charged me five pounds for it.