Medicine: Big Doctor

At an isolated mission in the red Arizona desert, 40 miles from the nearest paved road, 85 eminent physicians and surgeons assembled last week at an odd sort of convention. The doctors had come from all over the U.S., partly for an outing but mainly to pay their respects to the mission’s remarkable chief: big (235 Ibs.) Dr. Clarence G. Salsbury, 62, who is rounding out 20 years of medical missionary work among the Navajo Indians.

When “Big Doctor,” as the Indians call him, arrived at Ganado on the Navajo reservation in 1927, after twelve years of missionary doctoring in China, he found the Navajos in a “far sorrier plight than the Chinese.” Typhoid, diphtheria and tuberculosis were rampant, and tribal medicine men were about the only “doctors” the Navajos had. Dr. Salsbury got the Presbyterian Board of Missions to build him a two-story stone hospital. He and his wife drove out over the rough wagon trails to drum up trade.

Alarming Bugs. The Navajos, fearful at first of the white man’s medicine, watched with blank faces while the doctor treated the white traders. Presently some of the bolder Indians began to ask him to patch up their injured horses and to yank their own aching teeth. The Indians soon discovered that the hospital could be useful, too. When a Navajo dies at home, tribal custom decrees that his hogan (hut) must be burned. By hurrying a dying relative to the hospital, the Navajos learned to save their hogans.

But Dr. Salsbury’s powerful medicine eventually caught on. When a medicine man objected to inoculations against typhoid, a Salsbury assistant showed him some contaminated water under a microscope: “See those bugs? They’ll kill all of you if you don’t let me help.” The medicine man was impressed. Fascinated by X rays, the Indians began to troop to the hospital to have their pictures taken. Mission schoolchildren, envious of the attention paid to any classmate who had his appendix out, demanded to be operated on too.

Helpful Patients. Once the Navajos are won over, Dr. Salsbury says, they make wonderful patients. They rarely show irritation and are stoical about pain. They also seem to be impervious to many of the white man’s diseases: Dr. Salsbury has never found a case of scarlet fever among the Navajos. Also rare: diabetes, breast cancer, baldness.

Despite Big Doctor’s backbreaking work (his daily schedule: 6:30 a.m. to midnight), Navajo health is still bad (the T.B. rate is 14 times the national average; the infant death rate, seven times). Says Salsbury: the neglected Navajos need more doctors, better sanitation, a more nourishing standard of living.

Today Dr. Salsbury’s 150-bed mission hospital is the reservation’s showpiece. Salsbury has four assistants (three of them Chinese) and has trained scores of Indian nurses. He also runs a high school, a home-economics school, an ice plant, a power plant, a coal mine (the mission digs all its own fuel).

All told, he has treated some 25,000 Navajo patients—and his missionary work has reached many more. Said one of the visitors to Dr. Salsbury’s annual clinic last week: “What brings us here is the deep religious and medical convictions of the man, and his immense sense of humanity.”