Medicine: Guam's Doctor

In recaptured Guam, Dr. Ramon Sablan, a keen-faced, 42-year-old native Chamorro, last week was elbow-deep again in his remarkable career. He serves as health officer and sole civilian doctor for the island's 20,000 natives. His head quarters are two thatch-roofed hospitals where he and a dozen nurses, locally-trained, treat the usual spate of tropical diseases and Guam's chief scourges, tuberculosis and trachoma (an eye infection).

The education of versatile Dr. Sablan has involved a series of shuttles across the Pacific. He first traveled to the U.S. at Government expense in the early '20s to study agriculture. In 1924, after getting a degree at Oklahoma A. & M., he returned to his island to teach agriculture and music. On a second trip to the U.S., he got his master's degree in agriculture. His third trip, lasting seven years, was to study medicine. He got back home in 1940 with an M.D. from the University of Louisville School of Medicine.

From then on, he was official physician for Pan American Airways, examiner for a U.S. life-insurance company, a civic leader in Agana, Guam's largest town. When the Government ordered all U.S. families home, A.P.'s Guam correspondent, pretty Mrs. Dorothy Trady Perry, had to go. Dr. Sablan took over her job, filed the news faithfully until the Japs came.

Dr. Sablan's wife and little daughter got out in time, arrived in San Francisco on Dec. 7, 1941. Mrs. Sablan got a job in an aircraft factory in Louisville (her husband hopes that he can go there for a vacation when things quiet down). Back in Guam, Dr. Sablan took to the hills with most of the population. Of those who stayed in the towns, some were mistreated by the Japs and fled to him for treatment.

Navy men say that Dr. Sablan did "a great job" in spite of dwindling food supplies and the lack of drugs—he has a knack for keeping villages immaculate, the greatest public-health safeguard. As he has not been paid in three years, his Army and Navy friends are now trying to get an appropriation for him.