Book description
In 1964, newly-minted physician Stephen C. Joseph, just out of his
internship, undertakes a two-year assignment as the Peace Corps
Physician in Nepal. The job has two facets: responsibility for the
health and medical care of a hundred young Peace Corps Volunteers
scattered over the roadless hills and valleys along the uplift of the
Himalayas, and “do whatever else you want to do in medicine.” Many
lessons not learned in medical school challenge his ingenuity and
inexperience: Learn to carry your office in a backpack trekking two-week
circuits through the countryside visiting volunteers and holding
impromptu clinics in isolated villages. Struggle with the contrasting
responsibilities of being both the “Company Doctor” and the patients'
trusted confidant. Rely on your own judgment without medical peers or
teachers within reach to guide you. Come to grips with the realities of
Third World poverty, whose determinants are not easily remedied by
Western medicine. Some of the lessons are baffling. Some are brutal and
terrifying. Some are humorous, and some rewarding beyond measure. And
Dr. Joseph finds what is to become a life-long heart's desire: “doing
what you can with what you have,” especially in the more-remote places
of the world. Later, back again in the Third World, Dr. Joseph is part
of a small international team starting a country's first medical school,
and has responsibility for the crowded “Under-Five's Ward” in the
medically-primitive conditions of the Capitol City's hospital in
Yaounde, Cameroun. But it is mysterious Chad, on the edges of the
Sahara, to which he is most drawn, a little older and a little wiser,
but just as restless. STEPHEN C. JOSEPH's life in medicine has taken him
to residential assignments in Nepal, Central Africa, Indonesia, and
Newfoundland, with shorter stints in more than a score of countries in
Africa and Asia. His home-based efforts have included Neighborhood
Health Centers, and appointments as New York City's Commissioner of
Health, Dean of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health,
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, and senior positions
with UNICEF and the US Agency for International Development. He is a
former Chair of the American Public Health Association, a Fellow of the
American Academy of Pediatrics, and an elected member of the Institute
of Medicine. His previous books include “Dragon Within the Gates: The
Once and Future AIDS Epidemic,” and “Summer of Fifty-Seven: Coming of
Age in Wyoming's Shining Mountains.” He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
with his wife, Elizabeth Preble.
