Dr. Henri Hekking

 

On Japan’s infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway.

The disease-ridden jungle would have posed a challenge to Western medicine even under ideal sanitary conditions. Without instruments and manufactured pharmaceuticals close at hand, the best Allied doctors were helpless. In the jungles, these shortages could turn even the smallest wounds into death sentences.

Two Lost Battalion officers, Capt. Arch Fitzsimmons and Lt Jimmie Lattimore, having heard that a group of Dutch physicians was based farther down the line, went to the Japanese and begged them to order one of them to join Branch Three. Just one would make a difference between life and death. They offered their watches as a bribe. As it would turn out, a gifted Dutch doctor had heard of their plight and was asking for them in turn. In April, a doctor whom some of the Americans in Branch Three had met in Singapore showed up at the 40 Kilo Camp to join them as their on-site medical caretaker. His name was Henri Hekking.

Born in Suryabaya to Dutch parents, Hekking felt indeed that they were his islands. It was his grandmother, a committed herbalist and healer, who set him on the path to studying native medicine. When he was sixteen, his father’s work took him back to the Netherlands. Though he didn’t want to leave, Hekking went there to study medicine on a Dutch army stipend, then paid for his training with a ten-year term of service that took him back to the East Indies as a medical officer in the colonial army. There Hekking continued pursuing his grandmother’s art, first at Batavia, then at a hospital in the Celebes, and finally, before his capture by the Japanese, at a hospital in Timor. When the Japanese seized Timor and took him prisoner, it marked the end of his fulfillment of his promise to his oma that he would return and use his skills to help the natives of his homeland.

On his arrival at 40 Kilo Camp, Hekking introduced himself to the camp commander, Major Yamada. After exchanging niceties, the Dutchman told Yamada, ‘I wish to speak about food. The men will need meat.’

‘No meat,’ Yamada replied. ‘Later, Nippon kill water buffalo, Boom-boom. Understand-kah?’

Hekking was not bowed. ‘ The men must have meat and citrus – fruit, any kind of fruit.’

‘No fruit,’ the major said .  . . .

‘Prisoners are worthless driftwood washed ashore on the tide. In Japan, one who surrenders to the enemy was worse than useless, he was dead, for all practical purposes. He could never go home again, members of his family were disgraced, his offspring would suffer for many generations. But you are lucky; the railroad gives you the opportunity to redeem yourselves.’

The Lost Battalion’s Lt.  Lattimore, installed by Major Yamada as the food and supply officer, confronted the Japanese officer one day about the inadequacy of their daily ration. Yamada had informed Lattimore that working prisoners were to get a ration of five hundred to eight hundred grams of rice each day. In actuality, they were getting half that. The rice was ‘rotten and unusable, all of a grade the natives usually fed to cattle,’ Howard Charles wrote. But Hekking realized that the prisoners were contributing to the problem by washing their rice. He insisted that they stop. The ‘gray rice’ they were served – dirty floor sweepings with a certain proportion of bugs and other foreign garnishments – was in fact an important source of vitamins and protein.

Assisted by two orderlies, Slug Wright from the Lost Battalion and Robert Hanley from the USS Houston, Hekking ran the most challenging kind of solo practice. He devised some innovated remedies out of the jungle’s natural medicine chest. Certain types of leaves healed cuts. Long, saber-like legumes held beans that when crushed and boiled produced a tonic _’bitter as gall,’ according to Don Brain, but useful in reducing fevers. Hekking’s knowledge of jungle ailments and natural remedies was encyclopedic. If Pack Rat McCone was resourceful in stitching wounds with safety pins and twine, Henri Hekking took lifesaving resourcefulness to the level of mysticism, if not near divinity. He knew that palmetto mold could be used like penicillin, that pumpkin could be stored in bamboo stalks, fermented with wild yeast, and used to treat men suffering from beriberi (and it got them pleasantly drunk to boot). Tea brewed from bark contained tannins that constricted the bowels and slowed diarrhea. Wild chili peppers ha all sots of beneficial internal applications.

Hekking was supposed to report to British doctors who had been trained at the finest medical schools. Leery of native ways, they called him a witch doctor.  Hekking had as little regard for their practices as they did for his. Because supplies of quinine were limited, he never prescribed it preventatively. He preferred to encourage the immune system to function, and administered the medicine only to fight an actual infection. He mixed beef tallow with acetylsalicylic acid to fight athlete’s foot, distilled liquid iodine by mixing iodine crystals and sake, and ground up charcoal and mixed it with clay, a remedy that absorbed internal mucus. Assessing a skeletal patient squiring his insides out from dysentery, he could see beyond surface appearances and determine its underlying nature, amoebic or bacillary. When more potent medicines became available – Captain Fitzsimmons procured some sulfapyridine tablets once – Hekking would be miserly and economical, shaving the tablets down and administering the shavings directly into septic wounds. He used gasoline for alcohol, kapok for cotton, leaves for bandages, and latex for an adhesive.

Hekking thought the classically trained physicians were hopelessly out of their element. ‘It was most distressing to him,’ Howard Charles wrote, ‘discovering how different their approaches were to the treatment of tropical diseases . . . he was light-years ahead of these doctors.’ One of Branch Five medical officers, Captain Lumpkin, who practiced medicine in Amarillo before mustering for the war, said that any doctor who trained in the jungle with the Dutch East Indian Colonial Army knew more about tropical diseases than the collective mind of the American Medical Association.

Hekking saw his patients as whole human beings and treated the whole man. ‘He was the first man I ever herd of that treated a man as a unit,’ said Slug Wright. ‘He claimed that a man had to be cured two ways: the body was only a small part of it; the mind is important as well. So he cured the mind and body together. He was using psychosomatic medicine.’ Hekking sometimes turned around a patient in decline by intentionally angering him. He found that a rush of rage could be a lifesaving stimulant, even if the patient was in no shape to act a

out the impulse. Hekking inspired such confidence in his patients that even his placebos had powerful effects. He saved a different kind of placebo for the enemy. When Japanese soldiers came to him for help with venereal disease, he would send them back to the native black markets to get the medicine he needed. When the medication was brought to him, he would set it aside for the prisoners and inject the Japanese with water. Sometimes he gave them a salve of plain acid and told them to apply it regularly. He didn’t mind seeing them jump. He seemed fearless. Once he took a sulfapyridine tablet and made a mold of it. With the mold in hand, he was able to cast replicas using rice flour and plaster of Paris. He would trade the counterfeits to the Japanese for the quinine and other medicines his patients so urgently needed.

Hekking was the gatekeeper between the sick ward and the railway work parties. When the Japanese came around demanding workers, patients looked to him for a reprieve. Hekking would place the worst ones on the limited-duty or no-duty list. The next morning, if the Japanese couldn’t fulfill their quota of workers, they would go through the sick bay and grab the sick for duty on the line. It fell to the doctor to protest the selection. Many times, he got the hell pounded out of him for his audacity.

Henri Hekking worked one of his miracles on Jim Gee. The Marine was one of the first Houston men to go down with a fever, collapsing while digging a grave in the jungle out by 26 Kilo Camp. Taken to the medical tent, he lay unconscious for three days. His meltdown was so severe, his loss of fluids so pronounced, that he lost fifty pounds within a week. In the midst of his delirium, Gee remembered coming to and seeing a strange man speaking a strange tongue. He didn’t know if he was in heaven or hell. He heard someone say his struggle ha been long and difficult, that he had neatly lost his mind. It was Hekking, who for thirty-six hours straight had sat by his bed, patently enduring the Marine’s rage. Hekking had brought a large sack full of roots taken from a low-growing weed known as Cephaelis ipecacuanha. Major Yamada, in a show of mercy – or perhaps just impatience with Hekking’s doggedness – had permitted him to go into the jungle, under guard, to gather the plants. He boiled them into a herbal tonic and cajoled the Marine to drink, encouraging him, touching his hand to his patient’s clammy skin. Gee struggled to sit upright and drink. Hekking got some people to carry him outside and sat him in the sun. When Gee’s strength came back, the good doctor saw to it that he was taken back to the field hospital in Thanbyuzayat.