Medicine: Scourge of the North

To many Americans, Alaska is a remote, glacial wasteland remembered vaguely as: 1) a sprawling territory, twice the size of Texas, which the U.S. acquired from Russia in a forgotten real-estate deal; 2) the site of North America’s highest peak, Mt. McKinley (20,464 feet); 3) home ground of Robert Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

Last week an Alaskan with more current information about the territory was in Washington, D.C. Dr. Conrad Earl Albrecht, Alaska’s first full-time commissioner of health, had travelled 5,000 miles from Juneau to the nation’s capital with an important message. He told it with table-pounding earnestness. His sorry story:

Alaska has one of the highest death rates in the world from tuberculosis, eight times that of the U.S. Of Alaska’s estimated 90,000 population, at least 4,000 (and probably more) have T.B. To care for them, Alaska has only 289 hospital beds, one sanatorium, only one qualified T.B. assistant in the health department.

Wanted: Beds. When Washington asked a put-up-or-shut-up question (”What is Alaska doing about it?”), Albrecht had a stopper: none-too-wealthy Alaska had voted $250,000, about one-tenth of its annual budget, for an anti-T.B. campaign; its able Governor, Dr. Ernest Gruening (pronounced greening) had declared a state of emergency. Now would Congress meet the request of the Office of Indian Affairs for $2,775,000 to start building a 200-bed sanatorium?

Earl Albrecht had a right to talk like a zealot. Like his father, he had trained to be a Moravian missionary, in an evangelical Protestant church which claims to be the only one with more missionaries in the field than members at home. As a college student he accompanied a choir on that most evangelical of instruments, the trombone. In 1935 he went north to Alaska as a doctor.

In eleven years (four of them in Army service at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage), he had been appalled to find as many as 18 natives living chockablock in one small, stove-heated log cabin. He knew that T.B. would never be checked unless cases were isolated. He also knew that the natives’ resistance to the white man’s plague had been greatly lessened by their narrow, unbalanced diet, by the introduction of white men’s fire water, soft drinks, candy and carbohydrates.

But Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts were good, stoic patients who followed directions well and the Alaskan climate was favorable to the treatment of T.B. If Earl Albrecht could get 1,000 beds, he was confident the disease could be licked.