The Old Man

In the operating theater whose big windows fronted on the jungle, the woman patient's abdomen was laid open. Surgeon Olwen Silgardo was worried. The mask could not filter out the strain in his voice as he asked: "Somebody send for the old man, please." The old man hurried in without waiting to don a mask. "Is that a cyst?" he asked. "No," answered Silgardo, "it looks as though a tumor has spread." The old man asked: "Do you mind if I get my hands in there?" A nurse helped him into his surgical gloves. The two doctors proceeded to do surgery's best in a nearly hopeless case.

The old man was the "Burma Surgeon," Gordon Stifler Seagrave, who is just short of 64 years old, and looks older. Through four decades and many tropical illnesses he has labored at Namkham in northeastern Burma, within sight of the China border, 130 miles by the rugged Burma Road from an airport. Dr. Seagrave has made Namkham a legend of effective American aid to an underdeveloped area.

Medicine for 400,000. Seagrave's main hospital building is a substantial stone structure which he helped build with his bare hands to show native laborers that Americans do not consider manual work demeaning. The other buildings are of flimsier native construction. Thanks mainly to a U.S. support group, American Medical Center for Burma, Inc., which raises funds, and to drug manufacturers who donate supplies, Dr. Seagrave is able to practice and supervise good medical care for a population of border tribesmen totaling some 400,000. He fills 250 beds and 50 mats with about 2,500 admissions a year for surgery and an equal number for medical treatment, plus 10,000 out patient visits. He also runs one of the best Western-style nursing schools of any of the underdeveloped countries.

The Burma surgeon does all this on less than a shoestring, but then he always has.

He got started with a wastebasketful of broken surgical instruments that he salvaged from Johns Hopkins Hospital. The hospital's yearly budget is $75,000-- a third of what Seagrave needs. He takes only $90 a month as salary and pays for his own food out of it.

"Take the Baby." Dr. Seagrave, who no longer visits the U.S., vows to die in Burma. He tires easily; he has heart trouble -- despite which he is a chain smoker.

Last week he welcomed a report from his U.S. backers that they have signed up two helpers for him: Dr. Myron Donald Olmanson, 29, and his teacher-wife Barbara of St. Peter, Minn.

Both the harsh and the tender sides of Dr. Seagrave's personality came through on a CBS television report last week.

He showed mock gruffness with student nurses who tied granny knots in scarflike slings. He was so tense as he scrubbed up to do a Caesarean operation that a nurse had to stand by his side and put the in evitable cigarette into his mouth for an occasional drag. He almost barked, "Take the baby away from me now!" as soon as he saw that it was alive though blue from oxygen deprivation. While he stitched up the mother, he snapped at the nurses in their own Shan dialect -- they were having difficulty, even using oxygen, in getting the baby to breathe. When the baby gasped its first, faint squawks, tough old Surgeon Seagrave's relief was as obvious as that of the softest hearted televiewer.

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