Post #632232 by TikiTomD on Fri, Apr 13, 2012 12:35 PM

TropicDrinkBoy, please be sure to share the results of your experiment with the original Doctor Funk recipe, including ingredient proportions, as there is quite a bit of ambiguity in “a portion of absinthe.”

Club Nouméa, the fale seems the perfect pre-Tiki architecture for entertaining in tropic climes. Interesting that you would find one in a New Zealand back yard.

Picking back up with the tale of Dr. Funk, the person...

Recall that the Imperial Governor of German Samoa, Dr. Wilhelm Solf, had found the fiercely independent Dr. Funk to be every bit as difficult to control as he had initially feared. However, compared with the major league troubles he faced in balancing the interests of the German Empire and those of the native Samoans, Dr. Solf likely found Funk to be a relatively minor and sporadic irritation... that is, until Funk socialized with Richard Deeken, head of the small planters’ association and arch political foe of the Governor. With that transgression, Solf was highly offended and hurt; it was beyond belief that anyone in his own administration would be associated in any capacity with Deeken.

So, in July of 1904, the Governor dismissed Dr. Funk. The newly unemployed Funk was nearly 60 years old. The Deeken affair convinced the Governor beyond a doubt that Dr. Funk had gone “Troppo” and was no longer up to handling the rigors of the job.

Wilhelm Solf must have retained a soft spot for his old medico and a degree of professional respect, for he continued to employ Dr. Funk as a physician on a casual basis. He also allowed him to continue making meteorological observations for the government. In a much earlier post, we saw that in 1910 the German administration officially acknowledged Dr. Funk’s lifetime meteorological contributions by awarding him the Order of the Red Eagle (4th Class), a major civilian honor. This could only have happened with Solf’s endorsement and approval. In The Cyclopedia of Samoa of 1907, Dr. Funk was observed to have retired in 1904 (not been fired), another accession on the part of Solf, under whose authority this work was published...

I love the publisher’s note at the beginning of The Cyclopedia of Samoa, which reads in part...

Here’s an excerpt from the biographic sketch of Dr. Schwesenger, who replaced Dr. Funk as Apia health officer...

From the biographic sketch of Dr. Funk, we get a snapshot of our irrepressible medico in his early 60s, as well as a sense of how attached he was to Samoa and Samoa to him...

An able medico and a staunch and jovial friend, Dr. Funk would be missed if he ever took his departure from Samoa; but he never will; he loves the land; he is wedded to it, and to leave it now, after a residence extending over a quarter of a century, would be as big a wrench to him as to his many friends. Dr. Funk is a landmark and a fixture.

On his assessment, in part, of the health threats to the native Samoans...

Dr. Funk expresses a decided opinion – an opinion, he says, confirmed by his long experience – that tuberculosis carries off a tremendous percentage of the native population. There is, however, another and more loathsome disease, which is known among the natives as “the white curse,” from which the natives suffer. Dr. Funk declares that half the natives have been contaminated by it, a statement the serious import of which cannot lightly be passed over.

Curiously, there is no mention of Doctor Funk, the cocktail, not even in the accompanying The Cyclopedia of Tahiti...

-Tom