Until September of 1890, Amy lived at the hospital and Lutz in the center of the city. Bertha, who was their first child and who would be born a few years later, remembers that her mother told her that
when she would do her shopping in Honolulu, everyone knew her and the merchants received her very well, but everyone begged her not to touch the merchandise. They opened their wares and showed her everything she wished to see, but did not want her, under any circumstances, to touch the things she planned to buy until after she had paid for them. (Lutz, Lutziana)
According to Bertha Lutz, what drew Sister Rose Gertrude to the Brazilian doctor was his fearlessness about his risk of contracting the disease, and his consequent affection for and closeness to his patients. Other doctors
did not hide their repugnance for examining the lepers, while he was completely natural and warm with them, as though they were ordinary patients or personal friends. She soon followed his example, and during the time that she was in the ... leper hospital, she never avoided contact with them and never contracted the disease. This situation, which both faced with great courage, could not have failed to bring them together.
(Corrêa, 1992, p.150)
As we have seen, their friendship proved fodder for the malice of Kahalehili and others in the hygiene department, especially the habit they had of taking long rides on horseback during their free time, when Amy used secular clothing instead of the nun’s habit (Law, n.d., p.4). Dreizehner, one of the patients who testified before the legislative commission, made an interesting comment:
“Sister complains that she has been insulted, and she has been insulted. Now, there is one man from South America who saw that the Sister needed help, and he has helped her – he has been behind her all the time just like a dog”
(Hawaii, Legislature, 1890, p.29).
In his private practice, Lutz had mostly European patients who were residing in Honolulu, “including many Portuguese.” He had very good relations with a German family and with a Chinese man who had great influence over the community of foreigners. The English nurse also began to be part of this circle of people who were not afraid of contact with people who lived among lepers.
According to Bertha Lutz, they had good relations with the native elite. As an illustration of this, she cites a note sent by Kapiolani, the Queen of Hawaii, to Lutz when one of the young woman of her court was examined by him. She
Note written by the Queen of Hawaii to Adolpho Lutz on April 4th, 1890: “Dear Doctor Lutz. Sir. Will you be king enough to examine Hahünaib Kaauwai [?] if she has any signs of the Leprosy, and if anything can be done to the poor child, please let me know by the bearer. H. M. Queen Kapiolani. Iolani Palace” (BR.MN. Fundo Adolpho Lutz. Caixa 22, pasta 255).
would have said: “I greatly fear what I already know will be your diagnosis.”
And, in fact, the girl did have leprosy. “My mother spoke of the queen’s great courteousness and of how she sometimes gave my mother plants that did not grow in England for her little garden” (Lutziana).
The only people with whom Adolpho Lutz did not get along well were the missionaries
who wanted to convert the natives, the kanakas, but who did things that seemed to have little honesty, such as trading large expanses of land for small trinkets and punishing them for minor infractions. Dr. Lutz used to say that some of the large fortunes of the archipelago’s well-known families had origins that it was better not to think too much about...
(Lutz, Lutziana)
The crisis we have related here brought the Brazilian physician and the English nurse together, despite differing views of religion. But Lutz’ Germanic formality and the decorousness of the young woman who had been brought up according to strict Victorian manners did not allow the two to permit subside the sentiments that each held for the other, and which certainly they were unable to mask as they carried out their daily responsibilities. At the invitation of Mr. Liu, the Chinese man who was so influential in Honolulu, Amy went to
stay at the house where he lived with his family while she waited for her return to England. Days before her voyage, the young Brazilian physician asked for her hand in marriage. In Bertha Lutz’ narrative, (Lutziana), the marriage took place on April 19, 1891, in Honolulu, at the Chinese family’s home, with a bucolic altar that had been put up in the garden and decorated with wreaths of flowers. However, according to the documents consulted by Corrêa (1992, p.149-50), Lutz and Amy were married on April 11, at the home
Adolpho Lutz and Amy Gertrude Fowler’s wedding in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 11, 1891.
Instituto Adolfo Lutz Collection.
of H. M. Schmidt –probably the head of the German family that had opened their home to Lutz – in a simple ceremony celebrated by a pastor of the Church of the Central Union of Honolulu, with Schmidt himself, J. Ena, and G.
Woodhouse, the English consul, as witnesses.
The couple remained in Honolulu for a little over a year, until the middle of 1892. Lutz maintained his private practice, and continued to treat a few cases of leprosy in Kalihi and Molokai, refusing, however, the insistent invita-tions from the Board of Health to reassume his post. Amy maintained contact with people she had met at Kalihi after they had been sent to Molokai. In 1891, she used part of the money that had been sent to her from England to build a library in Kalaupapa which was
given the name of Beretania Hall (Law, n.d., p.5).
One of Adolpho Lutz’ favorite pastimes was making excursions around the islands to study their flora and fauna, and it is possible that Amy accompanied him on these trips. He published important papers in Monatshefte für Praktische Dermatologie (Sept.1891-Aug.1892), continuing to contribute during the second half of 1892, when the couple moved to San Francisco, California. In one of these letters he describes, for the first time, juxta-articular nodules, which would be later studied by Jeanselme, “as something new” (Neiva, 1941, iv; Portugal, 1944), and which today are known as Lutz-Jeanselme nodules.25
In this 1890 photo, a tramcar of The Hawaii Tramways Company stops in front of Aliiolani Hale on King Street, Honolulu (Hoefer, 1985, p.49).
Residence of Honorable C. R. Bishop, probably the owner of the bank where Amy Lutz made her deposits (Whitney, 1890).
In Hawaii, Adolpho Lutz continued his studies of parasites in humans and domestic animals. Biographers put an emphasis on his work on hepatic fluke worms and their sources, which led him to study the snails that lived in different parts of the islands where sheep were raised. These studies would prepare him for what Deane considers (1955, pp 80) his major contribution to medical zoology in Brazil: “his masterful works on Schistosoma mansoni and the mollusks responsible for the propagation of eschistossomosis,” studies begun in the first decade of the twentieth century, at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz.
Albuquerque (1992, p.13) pinpoints Hawaii as the place where the basis was made for another important later discovery by Adolpho Lutz: the realization that plants that retained water served as habitats for small crustaceans. This would later direct his attention to role of this habitat in the transmission of malaria in the wild.
According to a paper by the Centenary Commission on Lutz (1956, p.9), it was also in Hawaii that Lutz began entomological observations that would serve as a basis for his later activity in the area of sanitation. We will see that he already had formulated a hypothesis that leprosy was transmitted by mosquitoes. For Albuquerque (1950, p.13-4), this conviction would become stronger over the years, but was a result of the following observations made in Hawaii:26
Although he had never avoided direct contact with the lepers, he had not caught the disease, nor had the young nurse in whose tender arms many of them crossed the doorways of life into death. However, among the sick who entered the settlement, many had never before seen another leper. There had been a time, and not so long before, when neither leprosy nor mosquitoes had existed in Hawaii. The native language had no terms designating either ‘leprosy’ or ‘mosquito’, and it dubbed morphea
‘the Chinese disease’ since it had only appeared with the arrival of the Chinese and their rice-growing. This crop was, as customary, grown in ditches irrigated constantly with water, where mosquitoes, also coming from abroad, found an excellent microhabitat.