Adventurous Doctor

When the 1917 revolution broke in Russia, Eugene de Savitsch, young son of a prominent judge, fled to Japan. Later he went to the U. S., struggled against tuberculosis and poverty to become a doctor.

After his graduation from the University of Chicago, he studied at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Bunge Institute in Antwerp. A year and a half ago he wound up in Washington D. C., where he now takes care of Congressional stomachs.

Last week Dr. de Savitsch, 37, published a swift, pungent account of his adventures (In Search of Complications--Simon & Schuster--$3). Highlights:

> Dr. de Savitsch interned in Chicago's Billings Hospital. He wanted to learn surgery, but there were not enough free patients to go round among the interns. Dr. de Savitsch was finally allowed to perform an operation. But he had no patient. For a week he prowled in search of one. One evening, in a Russian cafe, he noticed a man playing Otchi Tchornyia on the guitar. "Not only his face muscles, but his whole body writhed," said Dr. de Savitsch, "and I saw him make a frantic clutch at the seat of his pants. I could hardly wait for the music to stop. With little effort I persuaded the man to let me examine him ... in the washroom. It was as fine a case of strangulated hemorrhoids as any intern in surgery could wish, and I rushed him off to the hospital before he could escape."

>In 1936, Dr. de Savitsch went from Antwerp to the Belgian Congo to collect data on sleeping sickness. Except for their strong smell, said he, Congo natives made ideal patients. They endured pain "without a murmur," were "obedient," had "a strange resistance to post-operative infection even in the absence of ... ordinary sanitary precautions," were delighted with any operative results, no matter how gruesome. A man with a balloon-like tumor of the upper jaw had a large wedge of bone cut out. He called for a mirror and "spent most of the day admiring himself. . . .

'My woman will laugh,' " he said.

>Ten years ago, it was the fashion for U. S. medical students to polish their education in Vienna. Dr. de Savitsch makes some unpolished revelations about Vienna's American Medical Association. The Association, said he, "bought" charity patients from Austrian and Hungarian doctors who had been hard hit by the depression. If a visiting U. S. doctor wanted to operate on ten cataract cases, for example, the Association would buy them "for thirty dollars or so apiece. Eye doctors . . . would be contacted, and on payment, in addition to an exorbitant membership fee, of $300 for the patients, the client would be supplied with the ten cataract cases. . . . Many doctors . . . made a fair living over a period of years by selling their patients . . . instead of treating them. ... In America the young surgeon would spend several years in a clinic before he could get his hands on ten cataract operations; in Vienna six weeks of time and a few hundred dollars accomplished the same results."

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