Medicine: Doughty Doctors

To effete city doctors, divers doings of doughty country practitioners last week gave a twinge of shame, a tweak of envy.

¶ From Stroudsburg, Pa., Dr. George S. Travis, 50, motored late at night through heavy snow to a gunshot-wounded patient. The car stalled a mile from the patient's house. Dr. Travis proceeded afoot. Sleepy, cold, exhausted, he tottered into a snow bed, died.

¶ From Red River, Hot Springs, Idaho, Dr. P. J. Weber started with dog, sled and snow shoes to a blood-poisoned miner snowbound on a far mountain top.

¶ On Puget Island in the Columbia River 70 mi. from Portland, a child was at the crisis of pneumonia. Three other children and two women had influenza. Boats could not reach them through the crazy river ice. Dr. Ernest Lloyd Boylen, 32, of Portland, flew to them at night in a plane, made a precarious landing in the flares of torches and bonfires the island fishermen had lit.

¶ From Edmonton, Alberta, the Alberta Government's Traveling Clinic, only one of its kind, was preparing to travel north to isolated hamlets. Two doctors, two dentists, four nurses will be in the party. Medical facilities are so scant in rural Canada that patients bring their own beds to the clinic. Last year the clinic staff performed 1,408 tonsil and adenoids operations, extracted 2,775 teeth.