Medicine: What Few Have Done

Many an American male occasionally inspects his complacent life and for a minute imagines himself given over to singleminded, selfless service among the sick and poor of the world. Young Tom Dooley did not seem to be that type. Son of a comfortably well-to-do St. Louis (steel fabricating) family, he graduated with a middling record from Notre Dame and St. Louis University's medical school, and his professors thought him destined to be a society doctor. Instead, Dooley volunteered for duty as a U.S. Navy doctor, was sent to war-torn Indo-China where he took part in the 1954 evacuation of 610,000 anti-Communist refugees from North Viet Nam.

In the nearly seven years that followed, until he died of cancer in Manhattan's Memorial Hospital last week at 34, Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley III traveled 400,000 miles, raised $1,750,000, established seven hospitals in four nations, and brought a measure of modern medical care to half a million underdoctored people.

Viet Nam's misery in 1954 struck the young socialite with a force that he recorded in a 1956 bestseller, Deliver Us From Evil. "I must remember the things I have seen," wrote Dooley. "I must keep them fresh in memory, see them again in my mind's eye, live through them again and again in my thoughts. And most of all, I must make good use of them in tomorrow's life." Leaving the Navy, Dr. Dooley talked the International Rescue Committee into establishing MEDICO (Medical International Cooperation), to build hospitals in remote areas. He underwrote MEDICO's administrative costs himself with royalties from his book, set out on a nationwide lecture tour to raise additional funds (individual donations ran as high as $100,000), and persuaded U.S. drug and surgical-equipment companies to donate $1,000,000 worth of hard-to-get medical supplies.

Dr. Dooley built his first hospital at Nam Tha, a tiny Laotian village just five miles south of the Red China border, and his second at Muong Sing, 20 mi. to the northwest. He handled as many as 100 outpatients a day, wrote two more books (The Edge of Tomorrow, The Night They Burned the Mountain), and recklessly shrugged off the possibility of ambush as he pushed his Jeep through guerilla-infested jungle on daily house calls. A grateful Laotian government awarded Dooley its highest decoration: the Order of a Million Elephants. When critics argued Dooley was a "hit-and-run" doctor, he obligingly admitted to the charge. When they complained about his arrogance, Irish Catholic Dooley replied: "I know of but one meek, humble man who accomplished anything. That was more than 1,900 years ago—and I'm not so sure he was meek and humble." Then, in August, 1959, Dooley underwent chest surgery at New York's Memorial Hospital for melanoma—a rapidly diffusing form of cancer that is almost always quickly fatal.

Doctors were optimistic at first, but the melanoma spread to his back. Thin, exhausted and in pain, Dooley checked into a Hong Kong hospital last November, was fitted with a brace ("my Iron Maiden") that extended from his shoulders to his hips. "I am not going to quit," Dooley insisted, with a typical touch of melodrama. "I will continue to guide and lead my hospitals until my back, my brain, my blood and my bones collapse."