Alias Dr. Kildare

Down in Bay Minette, somnolent county seat on Alabama's Gulf coast, is a one-man hospital of a kind that few Americans realize still exists. His name is Dr. Leonce Dolhonde Newman. Dr. Newman is a Louisianan, who first went to Bay Minette four years ago. Since then he has delivered 527 babies (many under primitive conditions) without a single mother's fatality. Grateful Bay Minettens sometimes call Dr. Newman "Dr. Kildare." &

Bay Minette still remembers the day Dr. Newman arrived to start practice and uncrated a patented folding obstetrical bed and a nitrous oxide analgesia machine. Both are long since gone, because his patients flatly refused to use them. Bay Minettens have yielded to some of the doctor's other whims: instead of waiting until their babies are ready to arrive, most mothers now call him in advance and submit to a full course of prenatal care (the doctor's fee, including delivery: $35, lately raised from $25). But they still insist on having their babies at home in billowy feather beds, where the doctor, swearing softly, makes sutures as best he can.

Since the war Dr. Newman has had to make more sutures than ever. Bay Minette's 2,000 population has been swollen by wartime shipyard workers. Nearest hospitals in Mobile, 30 miles away, are so crowded expectant mothers in the Bay Minette area cannot get beds there.

So over the red clay roads of his 20-mile district, Dr. Newman drives day & night, sometimes with his pretty, brown-eyed wife beside him, delivering the amazingly numerous offspring of his philoprogenitive constituents. (When he tried to enlist in the Army, he was firmly turned down as indispensable where he was.) It is not uncommon for him to deliver three babies in twelve hours.

Dr. Newman's job is often complicated by his patients' primitive rituals: he still occasionally finds scissors, hatchets and axes under their beds "to cut the pains" (a superstition something like a horseshoe over the door). But his most vivid memory, which often returns to him strangely in the midst of a delivery, is "the smell and sound of an old hog scratching his back on the sills beneath the floor" during a birth.

Hardened by the normally harrowing character of his cases, Dr. Newman is seldom surprised. One case: called to deliver a Negro woman's eleventh child, Dr. Newman found that its grandmother had already been tugging at the child for five hours with her bare hands, had broken the umbilical cord and, gory to the elbows, was digging for the placenta when he arrived. Dr. Newman gave the mother sulfanilamide, offered a grim prognosis and went home. A week later the patient walked into his office, boomed: "Doctor, please give me some medicine to keep me from breeding so fast."

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