Knowledge is the greatest survival tool of all

Setting the Stage

A long time ago I lived in a place where it was hot and humid all the time. The medical was a bit behind the western world as well. In fact, most of the country was still operating with stone-age technology.

Most of the country was jungle, or at least most of the land areas… although since it was a series of small to medium islands most of the country was actually water.

I did live in a town, a small one of two thousand people. It was the second-largest population centre in the entire nation… There were many modern conveniences. For instance, we had electricity, refrigeration, and roads. Water was all rain collection, luckily there was a lot of rain. We used to haul water from the large collection tanks on the ground up to a smaller tank on the roof so that we would have taps that worked. Our shower was a bucket on a pulley with a showerhead on the bottom. It was great because if you boiled the kettle you could have a hot shower or at least a warm one.

The town was on a hill, a steep one, and the roads were in bad condition. For the most part, they had been paved by the Japanese during world war two, or at least that’s what I was told when I lived there. Needless to say, they had degraded a bit in the intervening sixty years (it was the eighties when I was there).

The Accident

One day I decided to ride my bike from home, at the top of the hill, to the main street of town, at the bottom. Halfway down my front brakes jammed against my wheel, apparently a defect with that model of bike, and I flew head over heels into the degraded pavement, scratching the hell out of myself. I had a pretty serious case of road rash, but nothing major. I washed myself off, soap and warm water. It was both my hands and my left knee. Not a big deal

A few days later my knee was red and swollen, but in the centre, it wasn’t red, it was a mottled black, white, and purple. Also, there were traces of red coming off of it.

My Fear

I was young and embarrassed that I’d let it get to that point, plus my encounters with medicine in Gizo weren’t exactly reassuring, so I decided to handle it myself. My biggest fear was that if I went to the hospital they would take my leg. That was probably exactly what would have happened. Luckily, in our bookcase, there was a copy of Where There is No Doctor.

The Process of Healing

The book told me to slice open the wound and pour in antibiotic powder if I had it. I did, so I did. Every half hour, for days and days. It took most of that first day before I saw an improvement, but I didn’t see it worsening, so I kept going.

Every half an hour. Slice open the wound, clean it (which was agony), pour in the powder, re-bandage it.

By day two it had started to shrink slightly and the smell was improving. No longer overpowering as soon as I took off the bandage.

I kept at it, day after day. I didn’t stop until the swelling and redness were basically gone. Then I watched it like a hawk, carefully and constantly.

Conclusion

That book saved my leg, maybe my life.

The Hesperian Foundation (now renamed Hesperian Health Guides) is the publisher of the book. It might be the most valuable health guide in the world.

Personally I recommend keeping a physical copy if you have the option. Electronic is great, but in the kind of situation where you need this, you might not have access to your electronics.

I have a medium-sized library of survival books. Where There is No Doctor is the only one that I can credit with having directly saved my life or least my leg.