Amphibious Doctor

Woolly summer fogs and bitter March nor'easters sometimes hold up even the U.S. mail boats that ply among the 172 islands of the San Juan group at the north end of Puget Sound, but nature seldom stays Dr. Malcolm Heath, 43, from his appointed rounds. By airplane, ferry, small boat and (in far-from-rare emergencies) Coast Guard cutter or seaplane, Dr. Heath brings a frontier brand of modern medicine to the islands' 7,000 residents and summer visitors. He is the only doctor in the islands and one of the most remarkable G.P.s anywhere in the U.S.

Shocking Pink. North Carolina-born Mac Heath served as a paratroop flight surgeon in World War II, took a residency in obstetrics at Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital after he came home. Later, Heath heard that an aging doctor in the San Juan Islands was dying of lung cancer, moved to Friday Harbor in 1949 and examined his first patients in the back seat of a car while waiting for his office equipment to arrive.

The San Juan Islands, he soon learned, make no place for a 9-to-5 practice. To make emergency calls anywhere in the 200-sq.-mi. archipelago, Heath took flying lessons, bought a Piper Tri-Pacer. He keeps cars at Friday Harbor and Eastsound, and a third at Bellingham, where he takes his more serious cases for hospital treatment. He also added a 20-ft. cabin cruiser to his transport fleet, painted it shocking pink for easy visibility. He makes it a point to leave word of his whereabouts--even on his rare fishing trips--so that local pilots can find him in emergencies, and signal to him when he is needed. Then his British-born wife Evelyn takes the wheel and deftly maneuvers the boat into shallow water so that her husband can wade ashore for his call.

Beloved Doc. The gravest medical emergencies in the islands usually find amphibious Dr. Heath close at hand. At Eastsound, Heath saw a light airplane crash with two occupants, hurried to the scene to give lifesaving aid to the single survivor. When a tree fell on an Orcas Island logger, Heath lugged the injured man piggyback to a Coast Guard ambulance plane. Another emergency call summoned Heath to a yacht to treat a woman who was bleeding dangerously from a severed artery in her thumb. Heath popped a rubber band around the thumb for a tourniquet, had an assistant sterilize instruments in a pot of boiling prunes that happened to be bubbling in the galley, proceeded to suture the wound.

The fishermen, loggers, chicken farmers and the elderly retired, whom Heath most commonly treats, are never embarrassed by oversize bills, sometimes settle accounts with the country doctor's traditional basket of eggs or a fresh-caught sockeye salmon. Last week the islanders found a different way of thanking "our beloved Doc." At Friday Harbor he was handed the keys to a new 20-room, $23,000 clinic, the finest in the area, financed by gifts from grateful patients and summer visitors. There were plenty of speeches, but after the ceremony Dr. Heath could hardly wait to celebrate in his usual fashion when something makes him particularly happy--he dances his Tri-Pacer over the blue waters.

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