BRAZIL: Man in White

In the white-tiled receiving room of the Goiaz Evangelical Hospital, four sturdy men put down their burden: a moaning farmer who had been gored in the belly by a Zebu bull. Down the corridor at a dogtrot came Dr. James Fanstone. He lifted the banana leaf that protected the man’s wound against flies. “Get this fellow into surgery,” he said. An hour later, Dr. Jim reported that the patient was doing well. What had he done about the man’s innards? “Oh, I just cleaned them off and shoved them back,” he said, peeling off his rubber gloves. Then he was off to look after another case.

For 24 years, with driving energy, grey, balding Dr. Fanstone, missionary for the Evangelical Union of South America, has been tending the ills of the people of the great Brazilian heartland state of Goiaz. Today, his gleaming, 130-bed hospital is one of the show places of the booming frontier capital of Anapolis, 875 miles northwest of Rio. But 58-year-old Dr. Jim can remember when he did appendectomies in his own kitchen.

Frontier Town. Brazil-born son of a British missionary, Dr. Jim settled in Anapolis, he says, “because it just couldn’t go any place but forward.” It was a junction point for mule trains then, had “only two simple streets and a dozen houses.” Fanstone was the first to practice surgery in the region; until then, appendicitis was known as “knotted bowels” and you “either got well or died by yourself.” He brought in the first X-ray machine, the first elevator; his six-story hospital was the first skyscraper.

Meanwhile, the railroad reached Anapolis and the town became the gateway to Brazil’s rapidly growing west. Now Anapolis, with 15,000 rough-&-ready, gun-toting citizens, is as full of gusty confidence as west Texas. In the hinterland, droves of farmers are rushing in to buy up cheap land, plant corn, rice and beans.

O Pioneers. Two and a half years ago, when husky, high-powered Bernardo Sayao Carvalho Araujo (TIME, April 7, 1947) was opening up the government’s Colonia Agricola Nacional just west of Anapolis he made Dr. Fanstone the colony’s chief medical officer. The growing colony meant a fresh load for the hospital, but Dr. Jim jammed in more beds, took care of all who came. Last week, as he watched workmen finish a new wing for his hospital, he knew that it would still not be big enough for the need.

Northeast of Anapolis, pioneers are opening up the great, mile-high, 1,800,000-acre chapada dos veadeiros (plateau of the deer hunters). In all Brazil, its land is best for wheat, and wheat is what Brazil needs. Last year the country spent $135 million on imports. Much of the chapada is forested, but the pioneers are hard at work, burning off the underbrush and rooting out stumps. When a flame sears or an ax slips, friends will give the injured what fumbling first aid they can. If that is not enough, the patient is packed into a truck or jeep, jolted and jounced over miles of cattle trails to the Goiaz Evangelical Hospital.