This tale of two Doctors told twice.
First, another epidemic at another time.
Tom Scott and I were boys when the 1940s polio epidemic shut down swimming pools, summer baseball games, some movie theaters. Crippled many children.
Tom’s father performed orthopedic surgery in West Virginia. But relatives in Maine —with low polio incidences —-offered to keep young Tom up north for the summer. Maine relatives lived twelve miles from where the author Doctor who created Hawkeye in the book and TV series MASH lived. Young Tom may have been infected with Maine dry humor.
Skip ahead to 1977. Tom followed his father’s profession. When Dr. Elam PhD visited Dr. Tom and his wife, my Cousin Madge, I was invited to accompany Tom on his morning visit to patients in the hospital. In best extemporaneous MASH humor, he told patients that I was “Doctor Elam From Austin.” Then proceeded, in front of smiling patients, to explain medical procedure used.
All patients smiled at the outside medical authority Tom brought to view their case. Until one cantankerous old patient, leg heavy with cast, scowled and asked,
“I’m not going to have to pay extra for this out-of-state doctor, am I ?”
Tom gave me no more bone surgery information in front of his patients. Might say end of my medical doctor career.
And Dr. Jonas Salk developed the vaccine that protected children from polio in 1953.
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