Back to the Country

In the little Ozark town of Steelville, Mo. (pop. 1,013), a trim, white-mous-tached old physician was busy last week trying to prove that most of his life had been misspent. For more than 40 years, Dr. John Zahorsky had specialized in pediatrics and practiced in big St. Louis hospitals. Now 79, Dr. Zahorsky was back in his old home town, bent on proving that an alert country doctor can do as much with a minimum of modern equipment as a passel of specialists with all the shiny facilities of a big-city hospital.

The son of Hungarian immigrants who moved to Steelville when he was seven, John Zahorsky worked as a pharmacist, file clerk and ladies' wear salesman to pay for his way through Missouri Medical College (since absorbed by Washington University). Within ten years he had set some doctors sniffing with his idea that children's colds were more often caused by contagion than by exposure to bad weather. Soon he was protesting against taking newborn babies from their mothers and massing them in an aseptic nursery.

Test in Steelville. The more he saw of children in big hospitals, the more Dr. Zahorsky became convinced that they didn't belong there. "When the young child is sick," he said, "it is happiest and shows the strongest resistance when under parental care and in its home. The practice of tearing the sick child from its mother's arms and taking it to a hospital is not good pediatrics."

Three years ago Dr. Zahorsky made up his mind to retire, go back to Steelville and test his theories by taking care of child patients for aged (eightyish) Dr. Rainey Parker, Steelville's only general practitioner. The results were even better than he had hoped for: of 300 cases, 296 got well without going to a hospital; two of the polio victims had to be hospitalized; two children (one with leukemia, one with congenital heart disease) died despite being hospitalized.

The Lazy Way. But Dr. Zahorsky wanted to test his theories on the entire population of Crawford County (pop. 12,693). He saw his chance this month when Dr. John Charles Doubek, 26, arrived to help Dr. Parker in general practice. Dr. Doubek was one of Dr. Zahorsky's former students, trained the way the old master thinks a young country doctor should be trained.

Making his plans for a detailed study of the whole county last week, Dr. Zahorsky was certain that he could prove his point. "As his experience grows, Dr. Doubek will be capable of dispensing with many of the laboratory tests now employed in a hospital," said Dr. John Zahorsky. "It is not a question of being opposed to modern methods, but of simplifying them for rural areas."

Disciple Doubek enthusiastically agreed: "I'm beginning to see how much you can get along without. I see what Dr. Zahorsky means when he says that fancy equipment and the too-ready use of hospital facilities is the lazy man's way."

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