For seven years in the 1960s, Ted Freeman was the doctor in charge of the main practicing and training hospital of the New Hebrides what is today Vanuatu. In what was the tin-roofed, wooden-walled Paton Memorial Hospital on Iririki Island, now the splendid location of the Iririki Island Resort, he treated everything from broken bones to meningitis, rheumatic fever and TB when necessary operating with a medical text propped on a lectern installed over an archaic ex US-army operating table and by torch-light. Traveling, queasily, in small boats and planes, Ted visited and assisted the even more remote hospitals and clinics on the outer islands. With his endlessly supportive wife, Dorothy, a young family and a largely local support team he worked to heal and mend and to improve the medical skills and resources in what was then a remote corner of the South Pacific. An appointee of the Australian Presbyterian Board of Mission, Ted established a blood bank, updated anaesthetic procedures, taught birth-control and came a poor second in the Iririki Cup Challenge... This evocative and amusing memoir brings to life the challenges, joys and frustrations of living and working in the Pacific.
