Medicine: Privies para Pedro

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The Indians of Peru are deeply uninterested in quite a lot of things. Some of the things that fail to stir their interest: hospital care, cleanliness, antivenereal treatments, vaccination, privies. Nor were they much impressed, at first, by Dr. David Glusker, nor by the fact that Dr. Glusker had been an instructor in Medicine at Cornell Medical School before he joined the Army last February. (Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs had discovered that Dr. Glusker knew a lot about tropical medicine and Spanish and whisked him off to the Tingo Maria district of Peru.)

Tingo Maria Indians knew little about doctors but a lot about medicine men and the curative powers of drums when properly beaten. But drums sometimes get off beat. In such cases the Indians brought their sick to the hospital Dr. Glusker had run up in the Andean jungle. But they brought the drums along too, just in case.

The Tragedy of Mrs. Gomez. One day when 30 pupils at the local school, encouraged by their parents, refused to be vaccinated, Dr. Glusker knew he had to do something. What he did was to write a little story in Spanish, The Tragedy of Mrs. Gomez and Her Darling Daughter Serapia:

"When little Serapia was only three years old, she caught the disease called smallpox. . . . The poor child died in her mother's arms." Soon the grieving Mrs. Gomez was visited by a little bird that turned out to be Serapia. Said Serapia "I went to Heaven. Saint Peter told me that God was very worried because nobody should die of smallpox. He asked me if we had a doctor in the village. I told him that we had none. But not very far away in Tingo Maria there was a new hospital and they had a doctor and a nurse."

" 'Now I remember,' said God, 'that it was not finished when you were sick. All right, dear child. There is no reason why anyone should die of smallpox. I am inspiring the doctors to vaccinate everybody. Once vaccinated, they will be protected from smallpox.' " Serapia explained that immunization for diphtheria and scarlet fever could also save children's lives and that it was her mission to tell other children's mothers about it. The fable concludes: "Soon there will be no more disease. Because everybody will be vaccinated."

Serapia did the trick: after reading her sad story, the children clamored to be vaccinated. Dr. Glusker, a gleam in his eye, went on to write a whole series of stories called Fabulas para Pedro (Fables for Pedro), a little boy who rarely passes up a chance to plug Dr. Glusker's hospital.