Post #629169 by TikiTomD on Sun, Mar 18, 2012 10:33 AM

Great stuff, Sven! I especially enjoyed the mental imagery evoked by that quote from the 1907 Cyclopedia of Samoa...

On 2012-03-17 22:09, bigbrotiki wrote:

"There is no one among the Europeans who is more popular...the familiar sight of him walking the beach with cigar and cane...as capable doctor and reliable friend he is indispensable to this place..."

In the Maubach article was a letter from Dr. Funk accompanying the 1902 donation of his Oceanic collection to the Neubrandenburg Museum...

The German ethnologist, Frank Reiter, who worked on the Museum’s Oceanic collection in 1995, was quoted from a letter in Maubach’s article as stating...

Concerning the existing Oceanic ethnographica in the Regional Museum of Neubrandenburg, acquired for the predominant part in 1894 by purchase and in 1902 by donation of the physician Dr. Bernhard Funk, a native of Neubrandenburg, it is a remarkable collection of cultural items from the individual island groups of Melanesia and Polynesia... Overall, the collection is of significant cultural and historic value.

Regarding Dr. Funk’s dismissal by the German Firm in 1881, I can speculate on a couple of reasons. He was a self-confident, even stubbornly independent soul who did not blindly follow orders. That trait led to difficulty later in his relationship with Dr. Wilhelm Solf, the German Governor of Samoa, and it likely caused him to clash with Theodore Weber, the director of the German Firm in Samoa. Weber was known as a talented, but imperious man who tolerated no dissention. I can easily imagine that Dr. Funk was deliberately slow to implement some request from Weber, and Weber fired him for insubordination. The controversy surrounding his marriage to Leonora Hayes, daughter of Bully Hayes, deceased South Seas pirate, and the subsequent embarrassment from its messy public disintegration in June 1881 may also have been a factor. Theodore Weber did not suffer employees who caused trouble.

Maubach’s article makes clear that Dr. Funk’s subsequent marriage to Senitima, the young and beautiful daughter of the Samoan chief, Talea, was a happy one. She was a loving individual who charmed everyone.

Regardless of personal loyalties, Dr. Funk carefully steered clear of the politics of colonial rivalries and Samoan internal strife, remaining professionally neutral so he could concentrate on treatment and care of his patients, who came from all nationalities. Maubach’s article goes on to state that Dr. Funk employed a mainly native Samoan support staff in his private practice. Funk himself was fluent in spoken and written Samoan.

From Maubach’s article, we learn that during the Franco-Prussian War, Dr. Funk worked under Professor Bernhard von Langenbeck, a famous German surgeon who was an authority on battlefield medicine. According to Wikipedia, von Langenbeck is best known today as the "father of the surgical residency” and also as the founder of Langenbeck's Archives of Surgery, the oldest medical journal of surgery in the world. He was cited as a bold and skillful surgeon who preferred not to operate when there was some prospect for success by other means. So, Dr. Funk learned his profession guided by the best and brightest of the times. After the war, following dismissal from the Prussian Army, and before his employment as a medical officer for HAPAG, Dr. Funk temporarily worked in the field of cardiology near Berlin.

On 2012-03-17 22:09, bigbrotiki wrote:

Apparently he had two traditional Samoan Fales constructed behind his house in which many festivities took place (backyard Tiki Bars?).

Regarding those Samoan Fales, Dr. Funk may have indeed had pre-Tiki Tiki Bars. As we’ll later see in the recounting of his interactions with Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Funk was a party animal!

From the Mosaik article, here is the title page of Dr. Funk’s book on the Samoan language with appended meteorological observations...

-Tom