Books: Flood’s Survivor

AN AMERICAN DOCTOR’S ODYSSEY—Vic-tor Heiser—Norton ($3.50).

On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, a 16-year-old boy named Victor Heiser left his family home in Johnstown, Pa. to move two horses from the stable. He never returned. As he released the horses he heard a “dreadful roar . . . punctuated with a succession of tremendous crashes.” He climbed to the top of the building. He saw his parents waving to him from a window, just before a wall of water and de-bris—”a dark mass in which seethed houses, freight cars, trees and animals”— struck the house, crushed it like an eggshell. With a self-possession unmatched in autobiographical literature, young Victor Heiser took out his watch, noted the time. It was just 4:20 p. m.

At that moment the barn began to roll over & over like a barrel. Racing and climbing, he managed to keep on top of it as it spun in the flood. It struck a house, was smashed to pieces. He leaped at the moment it struck, landed on the roof of the dwelling. Simultaneously its walls caved in. Victor clambered up the collapsing roof, was being submerged when another house boiled up in the flood and he clung to its eaves. He lost his grip and fell, but landed on a part of the roof of the barn, went spinning toward destruction as the wreckage piled up around him. Just as a freight car reared up over his head the pile of wreckage gave way, and he was shot forward with the released water. That sent him into open water, and he was safe. As he climbed to the roof of another dwelling, he made a characteristic gesture. He looked at his watch. It was not quite 4:30 p. m.

Last week Victor Heiser began his memoirs with a seven-page account of his Johnstown flood experiences that proved to be the most vivid and interesting of the 544 pages in the book. Otherwise a rambling, ill-arranged, badly-proportioned, autobiographical miscellany, An American Doctor’s Odyssey contained enough such passages scattered through it to make it the September choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club and to reward patient readers who were willing to wade through Dr. Reiser’s account of his successes to find them.

Quickly learning that “nobody wanted to be bothered with the problems of others,” Orphan Victor Heiser became a plumber’s helper, later a carpenter, finally went to college on the salvage of his father’s property, finished a four-year medi-cal course in three years. While still an interne, on a vacation in Washington, he took the examination for entrance into the Marine Hospital Service. With no preparation, he was one of three selected from 30 candidates, lost 20 Ib. during the two-week grilling, got by partially on the strength of his knowledge, partially on his craft. During the oral examinations he learned that the more delays he could introduce the fewer would be the questions. Consequently he stalled, hedged, purposely irritated the examiners to direct their questions to subjects on which he was well-informed. Thereafter his progress was rapid.

He was sent to Boston to examine immigrants, transferred to New York, afterwards to Naples. Often he found diplomacy as important as technical skill. Once in New York one of his subordinates called to him exultantly: “I’ve, a fine case of acne rosacea.” Dr. Heiser examined the patient, recognized the elder Pierpont Morgan. “I have rarely,” says he, seen such an angry man.”

For eleven years Dr. Heiser was Director of Public Health in the Philippines. Resigning to become Director for the East of the Rockefeller Foundation, he traveled through Europe and Asia, lived in Ethiopia, Japan, Siam, Australia, the South Sea Islands. Russia. His professional duties ranged from establishing a leper colony in the Philippines to conducting a colleague on a round-the-world tour in the interest of the fight against tuberculosis, from persuading Haile Selassie to cooperate in the struggle against yellow fever to leading a campaign against polished rice in the South Seas. Vigorous, informative, complacent, he discourses with equal animation on the history and treatment of leprosy, on his experiences in swimming in shark-infested waters, his friendship with the Prince of Wales, his meeting with King Humbert of Italy his kind trickery in disposing of 26 healtny children born of leprous parents.