Transcript: Tape 7 Side B
DATE: March 31, 1998
TAPE: Tape 7
INTERVIEWEE: Thomas Scully, M.D.
INTERVIEWER: Eileen Barker
PLACE: Dr. Scully's home, 1400 Ferris Lane in Reno
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Teresa Garrison (Revised 2016, Haley Kovac)
Thomas Scully: …Lew Barness said ‘I wrote another letter. And said 'No, we want to keep you.' But it was funny because his perception of the evaluation and the receiver were two different things.
Eileen Barker: Was it unusual for them at University of Pennsylvania to have military residents? Must have been.
TS: Yeah. Well, in pediatrics I was the only one they had up to that time and maybe ever since. There might have been a few in other specialties because the military was sending people to various big hospitals around the country to get special training of one kind or another. And for all I know in today's world they never would have let me go to a civilian hospital because in 1961, I guess, they started their own Air Force residencies and I may have been told ‘We're sorry, you're going to go take one of ours.'
EB: Yeah, you had no choice.
TS: I had a choice. I don't know whether I'd have had a choice later. I just don't know.
EB: Later you might not have.
TS: Right. Then I remembered my brother, Bob, who had been in the Navy in the Second World War, used to use the famous military ‘Keep your mouth shut, and your bowels open, and never volunteer for anything.' [EB: (laughs)] That was the three rules. Keep your mouth shut, your bowels open, and never volunteer.
EB: Military's a whole new world. I know because I worked for the military.
TS: Yeah, and I'm going to tell you how I learned some of this. February or so of that year, I get the letter from Wright-Patterson and it says ‘You're due to finish your residency in July or June. You will be assigned and you have a five-year obligation to the Air Force. Please indicate on the letter whether you'd like to go and be assigned in the eastern United States, the central United States, the western United States, European or Asia' which was Japan, or Africa, Turkey and a few other places. And I hadn't the slightest idea about what all this was about and so my brother's advice stuck and I remember calling up this office that it came from, actually it was in the Pentagon or outside the Pentagon, but in Washington D.C. I called and I talked to some sergeant and I said ‘This is Dr. Scully.' ‘Oh yeah, we have you on the list.' ‘I haven't the slightest idea about military life, yes I interned at an Army hospital. I don't know what to put down and what I'd like to do if I could, is take a train down, come and talk to somebody about my career' ‘cause, as you pointed out, there was no Air Force liaison officer at the University of Pennsylvania, there was nobody to talk to. I think there was an Army ROTC guy, but I may even gone and talked to him. So, he said ‘Oh sure, come on down any time just give us a call and let us know you're coming.' So, I went to Dr. Barness and said ‘I'd like to take a Friday off if I may', take the train down, middle of winter, so I did. Took the train first thing in the morning, was maybe a two-hour drive to Washington D.C. and I got a cab and went over to this place and by the time I got there, it was noon. And I walked in and there wasn't a soul in the place except one sergeant. So he said ‘Well, I can't help you doctor, they're all out to lunch. But Captain So-and-so and Sergeant So-and-so who do this will be back about 1:30.
EB: Did you wear your uniform?
TS: Oh gosh yes. I was in uniform, oh definitely. I didn't make that mistake, I was in uniform. So I said ‘Do you want to have lunch with me?' so he said ‘Yeah.' So, I took this sergeant out to lunch, went to some place and I said ‘Would you like a drink?' and he said ‘Oh sure.' So, I bought him a drink, I might have had a beer, bought him a drink, bought him a martini and said ‘Do you want another one?' ‘Sure.' So, I bought him lunch and he had a couple of drinks, we came back to the office at about two o'clock. He introduced me to the captain and the captain and the sergeant sat down and said ‘Well, tell us about yourself.' And I said ‘I don't know even what's available. I think, since I got a five-year commitment, I'd like to overseas for a couple of years and then come back and they said ‘Well, we need a pediatrician in Madrid, we need a pediatrician in Wheelus' which is in Libya ‘we need a pediatrician in Turkey.' in Izmir, Turkey I guess ‘We also need a pediatrician in ‘Tachikara' whatever it's called ‘in Japan' and I said ‘Oh, I'd like to go to Spain.' And he said ‘Well, why?' and I said ‘Well, my wife is fluent, her mother was raised there, she has aunts and uncles and cousins. My wife has visited Spain several times. As a matter of fact she was on one of the first planes that flew into Madrid after the Civil War, the Second World War was over because the Civil War ended in '39 and the Second World War began. So Spain was literally closed for almost 10 years, from the beginning of the Civil War in '36 to the end of the Second World War in '45, nine years. And Celia and her mother went back on one of the first TWA flights into Madrid right after the war was over and Madrid, until later when those places looked like they did during the Civil War still. Anyway, at that time Eisenhower had just finished, Kennedy of course was president now, but Eisenhower had been the president and opened up the base there in Madrid in '58. But there was a lot of concern because of a lot of anti-Franco feeling. Franco was still a dictator that they didn't want ugly Americans there and we think part of it was my wife had Spanish relatives there and could speak the language. I don't think that probably had anything to do with anything; I think what really was the influence, I took the guy to lunch and bought him a couple of drinks. So, after we talked about this I go ‘Well, my preference would be go first to Madrid.' Then I gave them a few other choices.
EB: Now this was the sergeant, you said, that you took to lunch? Maybe he had something to do with your placement.
TS: So, he said ‘Well, we can't promise you a thing doc. But thanks for coming to see us.' So, two weeks later, I get a letter ‘You have been assigned to Madrid.'
EB: Great.
TS: I know absolutely it was the visit, I know it was taking him to lunch.
EB: And the martini's didn't hurt.
TS: I don't know, I won't even say that and I wouldn't remember the man's name and I don't want to impugn anybody's reputation. And maybe he didn't have martini's maybe he had a beer. But anyway, we chatted and he was very nice and he was a guy with I don't know how many stripes, that's when I realized that the sergeants ran the military. And I also realized that they had slots and they didn't have computers, he had a card file in those days; there were no computers that I remember 1960, 1961. He just went through there, he had to fill a slot and here's a guy with enough interest to come down for the day and it was pleasant.
EB: He wasn't an ugly American. [Overlapping inaudible chatter]
TS: Anyway, I get assigned, but let me finish that story and then we'll come back to Madrid. Three years later, I have three years to go and the military was very nice. After you had been in for the first two years and if you were eligible to take your specialty board exams, they would ship you back to the United States at the expense of the military, take your exam. So, I was ready to take my pediatric boards in December of 1963 now, two years later. So, I purposely asked to take them at the Children's Hospital in Washington D.C. So, I flew back to Washington from Madrid, I don't know, through New Foundland or some place and spent a few days studying, then I went and took my exam. It was over, on the day it was over I went over to that same building and the same sergeant is sitting there [chuckles].
EB: Oh my word.
TS: And I said ‘Sergeant So-and-so, how are you?' and he said ‘Oh doc, it's nice to see you. How have you enjoyed Spain?' and I said ‘Oh, I really enjoyed it very much. As you know, I've got two more years in obligated service, maybe longer. I may make it a career, I didn't say I wouldn't. And I'm coming back to the United States, I'd like to…' and he said ‘You know the way it is, I can't promise you a thing doc.' I said ‘Well, let's go have lunch.' So, I invited him out to lunch. We went out and had lunch, I don't know what he had a martini or beer, whatever, maybe he didn't have anything. We came back and he said ‘Well, let's see, in July we need people here, here, here, and here.' And I said, ‘Well I'd love to go to the Air Force Academy.' He said ‘Sorry, that's one place you can't go.' I said ‘Why?' He said ‘Well Curtis LeMay's son-in-law is a pediatrician and he's assigned there.' And Curtis LeMay was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force at the time. So, I said ‘Well, I would like to get involved in education, I'd like to try my hand. Do you have any places that have residencies?' And Lackland had just opened the previous year or maybe it was the first year and he said ‘Well, I don't know. Let's look into that. I'll look into that. But have a good trip back home.' So, about a month later I get a letter saying ‘You've been assigned to Lackland Air Force Base [chuckles] in San Antonio in the Department of Pediatrics'. Well, what gave me the clue that the guys in Washington were running the show is a few weeks after that I get a letter from the Chief of Pediatrics at Lackland, San Antonio saying ‘Dear Dr. Scully,' or Captain Scully I've forgotten which ‘Welcome, we're glad you'll be coming to Lackland. I must say, I was surprise ‘cause I didn't realize we were going to be getting an extra position this year.'
EB: My word. This fellow wielded some power.
TS: Well, he was the guy that had the cards and had to decide and I'm sure he didn't do it on his own. I'm sure he talked to some captain and they talked to some colonel and they're sitting in Washington, they haven't talked to anybody. All of its correspondence, they don't know who all these people are. So, I remember my brother's admonition ‘Don't volunteer for anything' and also my own instinct was ‘I ought to talk to somebody' ‘cause I didn't have the slightest idea. So anyway, that's getting a little bit ahead of Spain, but that was the tail-end after my three years in Madrid, we can go back and talk about Madrid.
EB: So you were starting to think on education at this point.
TS: Yes, I was and actually I was thinking maybe since Lackland had opened and I know they were going to open up Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, they were eventually going to start a program at Travis Air Force Base outside of Sacramento [EB: Fairfield]. I thought ‘Well, I might make a career out of the Air Force and stay in one of their teaching hospitals and become a teaching pediatrician in the Air Force. I knew, by the time I got out, I already would have 10-11 years in, heck I only need to stay another 8-10 years or 10 years or 11 before I could retire. So I hadn't ruled out making it a career.
EB: I see. Well, that was going to be my question.
TS: I had not ruled it out.
EB: If you were ever thinking about it.
TS: I was only beginning to think about it in the context of getting involved and being at a teaching hospital.
EB: Were you sort of thinking at that point that you didn't want to go into a private practice? When did that start, do you think? ‘Cause you never had a private practice.
TS: No, no. I was still in training.
EB: No, no, I mean in your career. There was no private practice per say.
TS: Oh yes, when I came to Las Vegas. When I came to Vegas, yes [EB: Oh you did?] and I'll tell you about that later. When we got to Vegas, we came into a private practice and I'm glad I did that, in retrospect, and I'll tell you why later. Initially, I might make the Air Force a career, especially if I can get assigned to teaching hospitals where there's interns and residents; but if not I'll try my hand at private practice, but I'll just see what happens.
EB: The military life wasn't so bad then.
TS: Oh gosh no.
EB: You got paid.
TS: No, I have no regrets.
EB: As an officer you had decent housing.
TS: No regrets. And most of the places we lived on the economy anyway. I rented a house in San Antonio, I was renting a house in Madrid. No, in Madrid we were on the base, sorry. I had no regrets and we had a good life. So I have absolutely nothing bad to say about the Air Force; I was well-treated, I got good education, they got their pound of flesh out of me, I paid back every nickel. So, it was mutually good for me and I don't know if it was for them or not. So, I come back from this experience in winter, it was a cold, rainy day in Philadelphia and Washington and I come back home and talk to Dr. Barness and say ‘Well, I talked to the sergeant and I don't know where I'm going to go.' Month or so later, we get the letter and Celia and I are ecstatic and it probably saved our marriage and her sanity that we were able to go to Madrid with three little children and get some help for practically nothing. And I feel embarrassed about it and even guilty, we've talked about it many times and I remember Celia and I talking to a local chaplain, a priest, a Catholic priest on the base about the poverty in Spain. Oh, the poverty when we arrived there it was almost like it was during the Civil War. The garbage collection was stilled up there were people would rummage through the garbage dumps that were open-air and they picked up garbage in open wagons pulled by donkeys, there were very few cars. Most of Celia's relatives, who were middle-class, were eking by. In the winter time the heat would go off, they'd turn the heat off, in February no matter how cold it was, and they wouldn't turn it on again 'til the next November.
EB: This was a fascist regime wasn't it?
TS: Yes, but it was, but it was still a poverty-stricken country that was still recovering from the Civil War and this is 12 years later from ‘39 to '61. No, 22 years later. Terrible poverty, all over and the village where a couple of the maids that worked for us came from, you'd walk there, the shacks were dirt-floored, they'd sweep the dirt, it was hard dirt, and kids without shoes. And we had a lot of trouble with that, but at least we employed four people for practically nothing. And against the rules, Celia would go, not to the base, so we never violated the rule of the base, but we'd go downtown and Celia would buy powdered milk and buy all sorts of things just to see some of these kids fed. I went and made house-calls in a couple of these villages and treated kids that obviously were as sick as hell and gave them antibiotics and a bunch of stuff.
EB: You mean as military, you treated civilians.
TS: No, no, but on my own. And I'll tell you why in a minute. Anyway, it was really, very, very poor. But for $15 a month, $15 a month, and room and board; you could have a live-in maid and we did, everybody did. Everybody had a ‘chica' and the chica's didn't do any cleaning they were not an ostenta, they were a chica. They would help cook and they'd help take care of your kids.
EB: Is that like a nanny?
TS: Yeah, and we had two or three of them ‘cause they would come and they would learn a little English. Celia bought the first pair of shoes for a couple of them, would buy them clothing, buy them underwear, give them feminine products all sorts of stuff to bring them from a pueblo where they were living in poverty to be able to go out on Sunday and meet their friends on paseo in downtown Madrid. So, we had a chica, we had three of them, each one lasted about a year. One of them was wonderful and was there when Marty was born, ‘cause I delivered Marty at home in that house in Madrid. And then we had an asistente and the asistente would come every day and she would do the cleaning and do the laundry; and then the assistant's husband would come on Saturday and cut the kid's hair and wash my car and on Sunday he would come and cut my grass for a couple of bucks. But everybody was the same, but it was the only cash and it was American dollars they were getting and I remember talking about it with the priest. It was a problem for us, but he also said…
EB: Why? Did you feel like you were exploiting them?
TS: Well, there was some of that.
EB: Or was it the sadness of what you were seeing?
TS: It was the sadness of trying to relieve what you were seeing. Thousands, millions, well hundreds of thousands obviously that was the first issue. The second issue was he said ‘If you are too generous and too open with your generosity to these small families they may become ostracized within their own little community they had to go home to every night. So you want to be careful that you don't disturb their social environment and this is a structural thing that has to be corrected.' Well of course, Spain has done a lot better when Franco died and Juan Carlos took over and the Democratic government took over and the economy. And Eisenhower's Bases Agreement really was helpful in that sense, it did bring a lot of investment into Spain because it was not only the base in Madrid, but there was a naval base in Rota, another air base in Morón which is outside of Seville and another air base in Zaragoza, which is north of Spain. So there were three big air bases ‘cause remember at that time the Cold War was on and we were concerned about Russia and there were nuclear bombs, I'm sure, all over the place. Also, because of that, things like Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola they opened bottling plants there, I remember Squib opened a drug company thing there. So, we saw in the early ‘60s, ‘cause we got there in the summer of 1961, we were seeing changes and even Celia's family, now we were not the typical American military living on the base and never going downtown. There were many, many military who would go to the officer's club and never wanted to…
EB: Sure.
TS: Which is crazy, Madrid is a marvelous city. So, although we lived on the Air Force Base we got downtown as much as often as we could. Went out to dinner with all of her cousins and nephews and uncles and aunts and they'd come to our house and she would speak Spanish with them and we took Spanish lessons to improve our Spanish. Mine was terrible, but hers was good. So we got very much involved in Madrid because it was Celia coming back to her mother's roots, if you will. But at any rate, as I said earlier in this discussion, getting to Spain was wonderful because for the first time we took a vacation without kids. We had a chica that we could count on and so we took our first trip to Rome, never been to Rome, always wanted to go to Rome.
EB: You left the kids.
TS: Oh gosh yes, well, after she had been with us for a number of months and of course we lived in a compound so that when one military family would leave there were always neighbors who would look in on your kids.
EB: Other military…
TS: Oh yes, all the neighbors were military. And we made some very good friends, some of our very best friends today were friends we made in Madrid.
EB: Sort of the outskirts of Madrid.
TS: Lived in the outskirts and subsequently because of those friendships, I ended up in Las Vegas we'll get to later. And we'd do the same when some of our friends were going to take a trip and go to Germany or go to London or where they wanted to go because all of us had a few bucks now. The others would look in on the chica and be sure that the maid was watching the kids and they were dressed and all that sort of stuff.
EB: Did you travel military or was it…
TS: Oh no, no, no, no. No, you couldn't.
EB: You couldn't take a military flight.
TS: Only on military visits.
EB: Yeah.
TS: So, we went to Rome for the first time, we went to Majorca. We went all over southern Spain, matter of fact with one of Celia's aunts and a cousin, we drove all over and it was wonderful ‘cause they were our tour guides. I drove the big American car, they didn't own a car, I brought over the big American Ford that I had and we would drive and go away for the weekend and leave the kids with the maid. So, we had some free time.
EB: The roads must have been…
TS: Horrible.
EB: Not so great.
TS: They were terrible. They were beginning to build the infrastructure; there were good roads around Madrid, they'd go out maybe 20, 30 miles and that was the end of it.
EB: We were there just a year ago and it was wonderful.
TS: Yeah, but that's all been the last 30 years, but this is 1961, is what almost 40 years ago.
EB: Hard to believe.
TS: Yeah, almost 40 years ago. Anyway, we got there, we got into our little house; we were allowed to bring a certain amount of furniture over. So we actually brought that piano that belonged to Celia ‘caused she played the piano and we brought some furniture; although, it was a furnished place. So there was a washer and a dryer and all that stuff. So, we took a few minor things, very little. Most of our furniture that we had in El Paso, Albany and Philadelphia we stored in Philadelphia until we came back three years later. And the military paid for the storage which was nice, but we did ship our car over so I had a nice Ford Fairlane four-door and we could travel around. So, it was again an important part of our life as a couple and as a family because Marty was conceived and born there. I delivered him at home one night.
EB: This is your…
TS: Marty was the #4 son.
EB: Fourth son.
TS: And of course Leslie was conceived there and born just after we got back to San Antonio…
EB: And Leslie's your daughter.
TS: She's the daughter.
EB: And Marty…
TS: Marty was born in '62. Geary in '60, Marty in '62 and Leslie in '64 just after we got back. So, I would say, and Celia would agree with me, that three years in Spain was probably the most important period of our married life.
EB: Well, you had it pretty rough up until then, because no matter how adaptable you were to medical life, you were away a lot and a lot fell on her.
TS: Yep. Oh absolutely.
EB: Three babies.
TS: Absolutely. And she then was the center of attention of a lot of her friends when they were having trouble with their maids. They'd call Celia to come over and Celia would help figure out what was going on because they weren't understanding the nuances of why she didn't come to work that day or what her boyfriend was into or all that sort of stuff.
EB: She knew the language.
TS: We often would go out with friends downtown, American friends, she could help them with the menu and she could help them with all of that.
EB: So you were accepted fairly well…
TS: Oh gosh yes.
EB: By the Spanish people.
TS: Oh absolutely and I'm sure it's the case in many foreign countries if you can speak the language that's one help, but if you even make an attempt to communicate in their language, it's appreciated.
EB: You didn't see, feel hostility anywhere?
TS: None. No, but we were given a set of rules when we got there about being Ugly Americans. For example, we never wore our uniforms off the base.
EB: That was my question. You did not?
TS: You did not. The only time you wore your uniform was to and from work and at work. From where we lived we had to go through a couple of villages before we could get to the base. So, you'd stop to get some gas or something, but you never would go and prance downtown Madrid.
EB: In your uniform.
TS: In a uniform. Never, that was verboten. And even the generals and the big-shots at the embassy all wore civilian clothes. This was Franco's country. As a matter of fact, most people don't know this, but at Torrejón Air Force Base and the other bases I mentioned, there was no American flag. The Spanish flag flew at the front gate and Spanish soldiers ushered you in, but you had [inaudible] on your card and you had identification and you showed it to them so they knew. And once you were on the base the whole thing was run by the Americans.
EB: So you were there as the guest of Franco.
TS: You were there as the guest of Franco. And at the hospital, which was an excellent hospital, half of the physicians were Spanish-nationals, several Spanish military, but most of them were civilian Spanish doctors. So all of us, who were maybe 18 or 20 American physicians, I've forgotten the exact number, and another 10 or 15 Spanish physicians and we were colleagues. There was only one other pediatrician, he was a Spanish-national married to an American nurse that he met at the Children's Hospital in Washington D.C. when he came to the United States to do his residency. And they had four or five children and we talk to them and we write them and we visited many times back and forth in the last 30 years.
EB: Spanish medical training was good?
TS: Spanish medical school was okay, but very little of what we would call ‘hospital residency training'. Most of the Spanish physicians would leave the country, go to the United States, England or Germany, where they would get more practical and more up-to-date modern medicine. I'll say almost every one of the Spanish physicians had come to the United States, maybe one to England, and trained in our way. And then they came back and were hired by the American government to work in this hospital, because many of the American soldiers were married to Spanish girls and had Spanish-American kids; and we also took care of a lot of the Spanish military who were assigned to that base. So, the Spanish physicians, they all were fluent in English and we didn't speak fluent Spanish, of course. So, they were there also to meet the needs of the Spanish-speaking military dependents and the Spanish military. But you went through the gate, there was no American flag, sure there were American flags inside the hospital and a few places on the base and of course the flight line where all the bombers and the jets were that was all controlled by the American military.
EB: And you wore uniforms on the base, all of you?
TS: Oh gosh yes. And so did the Spanish officers. Oh yeah. The Spanish-civilian doctors didn't, they just wore their civilian clothes.
EB: It was strictly military people taking care of military people.
TS: Yes, plus the Spanish civilians, that's correct. That's correct.
EB: The Spanish civilians married to American military, you're talking about?
TS: No, no, no, start over. The ones we took care of would be American military married to Spanish girls, mostly men.
EB: And you would take care of the dependents.
TS: And the dependents, absolutely, because they were entitled to care.
EB: But not civilians from the…
TS: Town? No, absolutely not.
EB: Except the little extracurricular activities, you were talking about.
TS: Well, yeah. And I did that occasionally with my Spanish colleague, Lucas, Dr. Rubio; who was a wonderful physician, still is, terrific.
EB: Did you know Juan [inaudible], when you were…
TS: No, well, I knew him here.
EB: Here? You met him here?
TS: Uh-huh.
EB: I don't know where he's from, but I think Barcelona.
TS: Yeah, I think so. Lucas would say ‘I'm going to go out and see some patients in a little village, you want to go with me?' so we'd go. At any rate, that was where we practiced medicine, we went every day, we had an in-patient service, medicine, pediatrics, OB, delivered a lot of babies there. I didn't, but I did pediatrics. So, there was myself and one other pediatrician, a Spanish-national who was American trained, spoke fluent English. And we took care of all the kids who came in sick, we took care of the babies in the nursery.
EB: What was the health of the children of the Spanish women?
TS: Oh, it was good.
EB: They would treat their children…
TS: Oh yes.
EB: Because they had money coming in they could feed their children well.
TS: Sure, sure. There was always some discussion about these young girls from the pueblos who would latch onto a young American in hopes they get out of the country and go to the United States and who knows what happened subsequently.
EB: But what was their health like?
TS: Their health was okay.
EB: No tuberculosis?
TS: No, no. Didn't see any of that; I'm sure there were some who weren't well nourished. But basically the dependents of the American service man got immunizations and was brought to the clinic like anyone else and they got their food from the commissary and from the PX.
EB: So, there was no restriction in their minds. They didn't maybe have these immunizations so they wouldn't give them to their children.
TS: Oh gosh no, no, no. The children were well cared for just like any other American kid. They were American citizens, their father was an American Air Force man.
EB: I see. But if they were raised that way, I wondered about the mentality of raising their children, you didn't see any of that.
TS: No, but I was seeing a small microcosm of Spain through the eyes of Americans, when it came to the base. Now, I saw Spain through the eyes of Celia's family as far as the social and the cultural and the historical, but I'm talking about the way I practiced medicine; it wasn't much different than practicing in any other military hospital. I took care of whoever came.
EB: Sure; but when you went on to the community, what did you see?
TS: Poverty, lots of poverty in many of those pueblos and many of the pueblos where the chica's would come and work on the base lived in those villages.
EB: And what did the children have, what diseases?
TS: I remember one time there were a whole bunch of kids and families who got shigellosis which is a dysentery from contaminated water well and they were getting their water out of this well in the center of the village and it was contaminated. And Lucas and I, I don't know, we must have started IVs on 50 or 60 kids, they were just shrunken prunes, dried up from diarrhea. I don't know if any of them died.
EB: No dehydrated…
TS: Yeah, they were dehydrated and of course we treated them.
EB: Antibiotics?
TS: Yeah, well you don't really have to use antibiotics on some of those dysenteries, but main thing is to get them hydrated. I saw a number of fascinating diseases; I was asked to go to Lisbon ‘cause there was a small outbreak there of diphtheria, only place I ever saw diphtheria. And I saw a number of other diseases from North Africa ‘cause the Peace Corps volunteers who were in Africa, when any of their kids would get sick they would be air evacuated out of Africa to Madrid or some would go to Wheelus, most of them would come to Madrid. So, we saw a lot of dependents of Peace Corps.
EB: And where was Wheelus?
TS: Wheelus was in Libya, I'll have to check that, I think that's where it was. And so, I saw unusual diseases and I'll have to spell them later when we see the transcript; leishmaniasis, kala azar, I saw several children with echinococcosis, a kind of parasitic worm that you get from sheep, I saw brucellosis, only time I saw brucellosis which you get from contaminated milk.
EB: Who was taking care of these kids? I mean you and your friend were there as humanitarians, but normally who would be there taking care of…
TS: Well, no, a lot of these would actually come to the Air Force hospital ‘cause they were dependents of military in Africa, they were dependents of…
EB: Oh, those. But when you went out to the little communities…
TS: Oh, a couple of times…
EB: Did they have [inaudible] medical care?
TS: No, they didn't. They might have gone to the local emergency room and they had a lot of what we would call sort of assistants, physician assistant or something. No, there wasn't medical care for a lot of those kids, a lot of them died, but that was a small part of what I'm saying; we did that a handful of times. But the diseases I was mentioning earlier that came out of Africa that I'd never seen before were in children. Malaria, brucellosis, kala azar, leishmaniasis, all that stuff even diphtheria those were diseases that American dependents of military, in Africa, a lot of Peace Corps in Africa and also the embassies. Remember, a lot of those African countries there would be Americans there in the embassy. They may have not had much medical care and when one of the kids got sick and no one knew what the hell was going on, they'd fly the kid up to the closest military base. Well, the closest big hospital to North Africa was Madrid; so, people would be flown in with a variety of things that I never saw. And most of the time, I have to be honest, I didn't make the diagnosis, Lucas made the diagnosis, ‘cause he was familiar with tropical medicine.
EB: You had never seen this.
TS: I'd never seen any of them; I had read about them.
EB: Infections diseases.
TS: Sure, I had read about them in past exams in them in pathology or microbiology, you never saw them. So, saw some fascinating diseases, the only case of scurvy I ever saw was a kid, the parents, they were military dependents, poor privates. They lived on one of the mountaintops where they had radar stations and the mother had not gotten much help for her child and inappropriately boiled the milk that she gave her baby and of course that destroys all the vitamin C. And this kid came in with classic scurvy, had no vitamin C, all the kid was eating was boiled milk.
EB: Rickets too?
TS: Yeah, I saw rickets as well. What most people don't know at the time there were radar sights, they used to be called, all over Western Europe and they'd be on the top of mountains. And there'd be a little village there and there might be eight or 10 or 15 Air Force airmen, not even an officer, maybe a sergeant; and they'd have their wives many of them would be Spanish-nationals and they lived on the economy on this little village and they manned these radar sites or these beacons that the planes would use. You remember military planes flying around the world in those days didn't have all the technology they have today; they didn't have satellites telling them where to go. So, they had to fly by radio beams and all that sort of stuff. So, a lot of these radar sites, I visited a number of them and some of the episodes of going to these villages, I've talked about, occurred there where I went. I remember one time there was a radar site in Majorca, three or four of them actually, in the islands out in the water and they had them up at the top of the mountains so the planes could see their way clear to go to Russia or wherever they were going to fly. And there they had an independent duty core man ‘cause there was a fair number of people there, they used to be called core men and he called me on the phone and described what was going on and I said ‘sounds like the kid's got meningitis, I'll be there as soon as I can get an airplane, start some antibiotics.' So, I called my neighbor Don Thompson who was the Chief of Operations down at the flight line and I also called Lord Pickering who was the flight surgeon and I said ‘this kid's going to be dead if we don't get him over here.' So he said 'Fine. I'll get a plane, a jet, and we'll go.' So, I remember going down to the flight lines, it's been written up in one of the Air Force magazines. Down the flight lines, they put me on a jet with Lord Pickering and a pilot and a co-pilot, flew us over to Majorca, we picked up the kid. I did a spinal tap on the runway in the plane before they took off and I started an IV before we got on the plane and started giving the antibiotics, the kid survived.
EB: Little? How old?
TS: Oh infant. Nine, 10, 11 months old, something like that. Those were all sort of dramatic things, but the average, daily stuff was taken care of.
EB: Quite an education.
TS: Oh yeah, for me it was, it really was. And I've always been grateful to Lucas because he taught me a lot of medicine and pediatrics that I never knew. The other thing I appreciated about going there was, it was just me and him doing pediatrics. Sure, there were other physicians who were very helpful, but I was leading a very sheltered cocoon at the University of Pennsylvania where you had consultants for everything and although you could certainly get into trouble, there were plenty of people around to ask for advice. And now, all of a sudden, you're now responsible and the closest people is by telephone in Wiesbaden, that was the next biggest Air Force base where they had a hospital. So, you had to be a little bit more independent and you had an opportunity to practice your skills and knowledge.
EB: And you'd be treated the whole patient.
TS: And this story we tell in our book in the early part of Playing God. I was one of the first physicians there to see born a baby, product of thalidomide, with no arms. She was born at that hospital and her mother had taken thalidomide as an anti-nausea, anti-morning sickness pill when she was on a vacation in Germany. And you could get pills like that in Germany, you couldn't in the United States at the time, but you could in Germany and France, I guess even in England just over the counter. The drug had not been released in this country and there were eventually some 8,000 babies born without arms or legs or various other deformity, mostly arms and legs.
EB: But at that time were the affects from thalidomide known?
TS: No.
EB: What did you think when this baby was born then?
TS: I thought it was a statistical accident.
EB: You didn't make the connection-
TS: There was no connection. There was no connection with thalidomide, hadn't been published yet.
EB: I see. It wasn't until later that you made the connection to why the baby was born that way.
TS: I didn't. I wrote Lew Barness the next week and I said 'there's been a baby born that I'm taking care of who has no arms. Never seen anything like it, never heard of it. Can you tell me what happened?' So he wrote back and he looked it up in some of the books on malformation and he and I joked about it since that time, not about the kid, but about the circumstances. And he said 'You know, it's probably a 1 in 50,000 chance and these things are not understood and some accident took place.' Not more than a couple weeks after I get the letter back from him, the father walks into my office, the baby is now about five months old, and he opens up Time magazine, puts it on my desk and tears running down his face and there is a picture of a so-called flipper child who had no arms and the story about the [inaudible] publishing the previous week that some epidemiologist in England had tied it to this drug. And he pulls out of his pocket a vial of thalidomide which the trade name was Softenon in Germany; pulls out a vial and he said 'We got these when we were in Germany last year when my wife was pregnant.' And there were 10 in the bottle, she took two, two mornings in a row and there were eight still left, she found them.
EB: Only two [inaudible]
TS: Oh yeah, it was all it took. If you took them very, very close together, and I'm going to have to look up the details, it was around the 40th day of gestation. So, it was not even six weeks, most women didn't even know they were pregnant, because the arm buds come out in the developing fetus at about 38 to 40 some odd days. It's around 40 days of conception, so that's before six weeks or around six weeks. So women just begin to know if they're pregnant, they've got morning sickness. This pill was being touted in Europe, it was not released in this country. Matter of fact though, the lady at the FDA who prevented its release because she said there wasn't adequate safety test done on animals won the President's Award from, I think, Kennedy. Somebody gave her an award because she was proven to be a hero at the time she was being criticized for holding up this drug; at any rate, that's another story. But he came in with tears in his eyes, I took care of the child for the next year and a half or so before it came home to this country. We took her to Germany and she got into the Heidelberg University program for prosthesis along with lots of others, there were about 8,000 kids. But anyway, he was in my office, tears in his eyes, so we just hugged we cried, that's all we did. And it was two pills.
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