Dr. HIP

Q: "What's the best amateur first-aid for persons who have been Maced?"

A: Run large amounts of cool tap water over the affected area.

Q: "Will any harm come to our nursing baby if my wife smokes marijuana?"

A: Your baby is on a good trip anyway at its mother's breast. Why take a chance?

Q: "Is it possible to get a venereal disease in the bathroom?"

A: Certainly--but the floors are usually very cold and hard.

The letters--some silly, some tragic--come into the Berkeley Barb, East Village Other, Los Angeles Free Press or any of 15 underground newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. Their language is raw, often misspelled, jangling with obscenities. A few are transparent put-ons. Most, though, are hippies' cries for help on medical matters. Dropping out of "straight" society provides no immunity to mankind's injuries and germs. Like everyone else, the members of the long-haired generation are often ignorant and afraid.

Where can hippies turn for medical help? Increasingly, many of them look to the column of Doctor HIPpocrates, the surgeon-general of the sandal-and-speed set. They call him "Dr. HIP," but his real name is Eugene Schoenfeld. He got his schooling at the University of California, the University of Miami, the Yale University Department of Public Health and Albert Schweitzer's hospital in Africa. Now his jungle is the turned-on, freaked-out, sex-and-psychedelic scene.

On the staff of Cal's student clinic, where he sometimes treats toes that have been dislocated when their owners leaped from barricades, Schoenfeld answered so many unhip hippies' questions that he eventually became convinced that something ought to be done. He half-jokingly suggested to Berkeley Barb Editor Max Scherr that his paper should print a medical column. "You write it," Scherr replied, and in March 1967 Schoenfeld did.

Since then, Dr. HIPpocrates has become the best-read feature in the paper. Schoenfeld knew what his readers wanted--straight talk instead of "straight" lectures. To a questioner worried whether spray deodorants cause cancer of the armpits, he suggests daily bathing instead. To girls fearful of pelvic examinations, he carefully explains them. To a youth ashamed of his small genitalia, he reports that some women "would rather be tickled than choked."

"Do Your Thing, But . . ." Dr. HIP is permissive about pot, concluding that medical evidence is lacking about marijuana's harm to normal people. He cites unpublished research that suggests that LSD may be no more dangerous genetically than caffeine, aspirin or other drugs. But he warns against "street drugs" with their impurities, has little good to say about amphetamines, inveighs against fad diets and fasting and harangues his readers to get VD checkups. Freedom demands responsibility, he says, so: "Do your thing--but only if it does not harm yourself or others."

Why does he write his ill-paying column? Someone, he feels, should minister to the barricade brigade's medical ignorance, and "the best approach to any serious problem must be education." Now Grove Press has published a collection of his columns called Dear Doctor HIPpocrates--Advice Your Family Doctor Never Gave You. Yet Schoenfeld, at 33, has no desire to rise above the underground, "where I don't have to censor my material." Instead, from his ramshackle little bachelor home in the Berkeley hills, he continues his public-health work and the column for the sense of fulfillment it brings.

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