The Atomic Doctor

At 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Dr. Fumio Shigeto was waiting in line for a trolley to take him to Hiroshima's Red Cross Hospital. A nurse he knew waved to him, inviting him to join her near the front of the queue. Not wanting to push ahead of the people in front of him, Shigeto declined the offer. At that moment there was a blinding flash, followed by a deafening boom. Most of the people in the line were hurled to the ground, burned and bleeding. Shigeto, who was sheltered by the corner of a reinforced-concrete building, survived unscathed.

As one of the best-known of Hiroshima's "atomic doctors," Shigeto, now 72, has spent the 30 years since that dreadful day caring for the victims of history's first atomic attack. He has refused almost all requests for interviews. Last week, following his retirement (to settle in a home on the outskirts of the city and "raise carrots with my wife"), Shigeto consented to talk to TIME Correspondent S. Chang and reminisce about his escape--and the work it enabled him to do.

Flash-Boom. For Shigeto, the job of treating Hiroshima's survivors began moments after pikadon (Japanese for "flash-boom"). For a moment he paused, listening to the screams of pain that filled the air, and asked himself, "God, how on earth could a single doctor handle this mountain of patients." Then, although stunned by the explosion, Shigeto knelt, opened his black bag and began to treat the man lying at his feet, only to yield to the victim's pleas that his wife be treated first. After administering first aid to the couple, Shigeto turned his attention to the others in the immediate vicinity. Many of them were hideously burned; the streetcar stop was only a mile from ground zero, well within the "zone of death" where the fatality rate exceeded 50%.

Shigeto worked his way toward the fringes of the holocaust in the center of the city. He lost count of the number of patients he treated that first day, but vividly remembers the feeling of frustration that overtook him as he emptied his bag of supplies, then began tearing up his shirt to bandage the injured. Says Shigeto: "I realized how terrible it is to be a doctor and to be unable to do anything at all to the hundreds of wounded and dying all around you."

Late that night, Shigeto reached home to find his wife and two children safe. But his reunion was a brief one. Five of his 27 colleagues at the hospital had been killed in the blast; for the next two months Shigeto was so busy treating survivors that he could not return home to visit his family.

Deadly Radiation. Like most Hiroshimans, Shigeto wondered what kind of a weapon could have wrought such havoc on his city. But unlike most, he had an idea. On the second day after the explosion, he had some X-ray plates brought up from the hospital's storeroom, still in their lead case. When he found that all of them had been fogged, he remembered an article he had once read in a science magazine and concluded that his city had been hit by an atom bomb.

That knowledge was of little help in treating the bomb victims. Doctors at that time had only scanty knowledge about the effects of atomic radiation. But Shigeto and his colleagues soon became experts. Within weeks after the blast, patients began turning up at the hospital complaining tearfully that their hair had fallen out overnight. Their hair eventually grew back, but other problems remained. Doctors began to notice an increasing incidence of leukemia, a cancer of the blood-forming cells. Over the years, they have found among Hiroshimans a greater than normal occurrence of other cancers as well.

Shigeto became head of the city's Red Cross Hospital in 1948 and assumed the directorship of the newly built Atomic Bomb Memorial Hospital in 1956. But he still found time to treat bomb victims. "I'm a bedside physician," he said. "It's my duty to do all I can for them." His patients were reassured by his calm, Buddha-like demeanor. Said a woman suffering from a bomb-induced cancer, "I feel relieved each time he even smiles at me."

Like most Hiroshimans, Shigeto is a pacifist. He believes that "the nobility of human spirit will surely prevent" another Hiroshima. "Isn't it strange," he says, "that the worst disaster in human history should have turned me into a helpless optimist?" Indeed, despite his city's ordeal, Shigeto has been so impressed by the strength and courage displayed by Hiroshima's victims that he has unbounded faith in man's prospects for survival. That feeling was bolstered recently when he learned that the first two victims he treated after the blast are still alive today.

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