Medicine: Harem Surgeon

WANTED: Physicians for appointment to royal family. Young general practitioner or specialist well-qualified in surgery, particularly appendectomies. Wife also doctor, well-qualified in obstetrics and gynecology. Hot climate. May not have children accompanying.

Must be American-born graduates of Class A medical schools. All expenses paid for interviews in New York and Washington. Two-year contract, to $50,000 per annum for both. No U.S.A. income tax. Will reside in palace. Complete maintenance.

—Advertisement of the Woodward Medical Personnel Bureau, Chicago

A few young doctors who read the ad in medical journals last week thumbed fruitlessly through their atlases and then asked the Woodward Bureau for more details. Sworn to secrecy about the monarch and country involved, the bureau could only give a few tantalizing hints:

1) The doctors will live in a palace apartment and eat good American food; their employer will pick up the tab.

2) The husband will take care of a monarch and his male cohorts; he will also supervise the construction of a 50-bed palace infirmary.

3) The wife will prescribe for the monarch’s four legal wives” and his ample harem. She will have to observe local ground rules and wear a veil when out of doors.

4) There is so little rainfall in his land that the monarch’s wives and other palace ladies bathe in French perfume.

Adventurous doctors could make a good guess that the job would take them to a Mohammedan court,, somewhere on the dry but oil-rich Arabian peninsula. By week’s end, six well-qualified couples had applied.