Local author crafts a mystery out of medical history

The mountainous regions of Puerto Rico produce some of the Caribbean’s finest coffee. There’s just something about the elevation, it is said, and the rich soil, and the rains, and the cool mountain air.

At the turn of the 20^th century, something else was germinating up there.

Caravan of Specters, a new novel by St. Petersburg resident Carlos García Saúl – himself a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico – explores the arrival of American army physician Bailey Ashford in 1898, as the Spanish-American war was raging. After a brief series of battles, the island country was ceded to the U.S. as a spoil of war.

Ashford was a real person, just as the war was real, and today he is remembered in Puerto Rico as a national hero.

That’s because he was the first doctor to look into a pandemic that was decimating the peasant farmers and plantation workers – the jibaros – who lived in abject poverty in the mountains.

They were afflicted with a powerful anemia that rendered them listless and weak, with pale skin and drooping eyes – a zombie-like pallor. They wasted away, and they died, men, women and children alike, one-third of the population.

“The Spanish government had ignored the issue, which had plagued islanders for a century,” said Garcia. “It was very inaccessible in those days. It’s not like today where Puerto Rico’s a modern country, with the highest GDP [gross domestic product] in the Caribbean islands. Back then, it was a disaster zone.”

Garcia, a retired physician who labored as an ear, nose and throat specialist in Kansas for 25 years (he has medical degrees from Yale and Harvard) grew fascinated with the legend of this gringo doctor who not only figured it out, but discovered and administered a cure.

He and wife Lisa have been bay area residents since 2017. Garcia found himself looking for a project during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

“It turns out that my grandmother’s sister had worked for Dr. Ashford, back in the ‘20s,” he said. “Since I had all this time on my hands, I decided to research it, because nobody really remembered what she had done for him. It turned out there was reprint of his autobiography, which was originally written in the ‘30s.”

Garcia devoured the book, called A Soldier in Science. “The first 35 pages talked exclusively about how he came to Puerto Rico and discovered the anemia. I thought the story was absolutely fascinating. And I think it’s been largely forgotten in Puerto Rico.”

Through painstaking trial and error, with skepticism (and outright disdain) from the Caribbean medical community, Ashford determined that a parasitic hookworm was somehow getting into the peoples’ bodies.

Garcia took the facts, as outlined in the great man’s memoir, and created a compelling narrative, including the locals’ deplorable living conditions (spoiler alert: the hookworms were connected to personal hygiene). “Besides being a doctor, Ashford was an excellent amateur anthropologist,” Garcia pointed out. “Very observant.”

Ashford, his wife and all the military personnel, along with every date, place and fact are 100 percent true to history. The individual jibaros, and the people who aid and assist the doctor with his research in his laboratory in the city of Ponce, were created for the book.

“I had two choices,” Garcia said. “I could write a biography, or a history book. But that would have taken me too long, and I’m not an historian. I thought ‘I think this would lend itself to a novel.’”

(Garcia came to discover that his great aunt worked with Ashford much later in his career, long after he solved the anemia pandemic.)

Published by St. Petersburg Press, Caravan of Specters is a page-turning adventure story with roots in both tragedy and triumph.

His model, Garcia explained, was 1974’s The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a novel set during the Battle of Gettysburg. “It’s very interesting. It defies genre pigeonholing. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but virtually all the characters in that book are real. What’s been fictionalized is the dialogue, which has been imagined by the author, and the inner thoughts of some of the Civil War personnel.

“So Caravan of Specters in similar in that way. The main actors in my book, obviously, are real, but the dialogue’s all imagined. I think I would describe it as fictionalized history.”

Caravan of Specters is available at Tombolo Books, at amazon.com and through St. Petersburg Press.