Volunteers for Viet Nam

Of all the difficult campaigns now being conducted by Americans in South Viet Nam, one of the most productive is the work of a handful of civilians.

They are U.S. doctors, largely surgeons, who have volunteered to work without pay for at least two months in the republic's pathetically few and ill-equipped general hospitals. Their patients are the 15.5 million civilians for whom there is, in effect, only one Vietnamese doctor available for every 50,000--well over 50 times worse than the physician-patient ratio in the U.S.

$10 a Day. Viet Nam's townsfolk and peasantry have always been prey to tuberculosis, malaria, cholera and plague. Now they need modern doctoring, particularly orthopedic surgery, even more urgently, because they are frequent victims of Viet Cong shot and shell. The medical mercy mission was proposed by President Johnson early last year, and Dr. William B. Walsh, the persuasive head of the People-to-People Health Foundation (which sponsors the hospital ship Hope), agreed to run a pilot program.

The first group of U.S. volunteer doctors arrived last September; the current head count is 29, scattered up and down the country working alongside similar teams from Korea, Switzerland, the Philippines, Iran, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia. The U.S. program limits itself to volunteer physicians under 55. They get free transportation and a $10 per-diem for incidentals. Balanced against this is time lost from practice that amounts to a sacrifice of thousands of dollars.

Michigan Radiologist Hugh T. Caumartin, for one, decided the sacrifice was more than worthwhile. As a World War II victim of leg injuries from machine-gun fire, he had to get a fitness clearance. When Orthopedist Hugh L. Sulfridge Jr. checked Caumartin and pronounced him fit, Sulfridge himself caught the volunteer spirit. Both doctors flew out last month, Caumartin to read X rays and teach radiological techniques in Saigon, while Sulfridge went to the 70-year-old complex of decaying buildings that makes up the hospital at Can Tho, 80 miles southwest of the capital, in the steaming Mekong Delta.

Three in a Bed. Surgeon Sulfridge, who often has to make do without electric power or running water, has three Vietnamese nurses (two women, one man) to assist him. He makes rounds with an interpreter and is lucky to have one--many project doctors have to elicit symptoms and give instructions by sign language. Like all newly arrived Americans, he was appalled at first by the filth and overcrowding in the wards, with two or three patients in a single dirty bed. Within 48 hours he was performing as many as seven major operations a day, was so immersed in work that he hardly noticed the conditions.

The need for medical and especially surgical care is so great, the supply so short, and the gratitude of the long-suffering Vietnamese so apparent, that some doctors soon decide that their two-month tours are far too short. University of Colorado Surgeon Thomas Carey has volunteered for four months. Says Dr. Herschel L. Douglas, 31, a general practitioner from Lovington, N. Mex.: "It's difficult to come here and get involved emotionally and morally and then just go home and forget about it." Home after one tour last fall, Dr. Douglas found he could not forget. He has gone back, for at least a year, as U.S. AID public-health director for the Delta area, with its 8,000,000 people.

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