Word: smiths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Casket. Even these heroic efforts, over two years, failed to win the Montagnards' confidence. Then one evening Dr. Smith chugged into a village and saw, outside a long house built on stilts, a twelve-year-old girl in shock from diarrhea and vomiting. "Her father and brothers were so sure she was going to die," Dr. Smith recalls, "that they were hollowing out a log for her casket." Dr. Smith pulled out her infusion kit, hung a bottle from a bamboo overhead, and stayed up all night dripping fluids into the girl's veins...
...child's quick recovery so astonished the Montagnards that they began to pass the word that the white woman's magic might be even better than that of their own women sorcerers. The trickle of patients to Dr. Smith's five-bed dispensary in the provincial capital of Kontum grew to a steady flow and then an overflow. Dr. Smith thereupon began a long struggle to build a hospital outside Kontum, which many Montagnards regarded as a hostile city...
...almost as overcrowded as the old dispensary. For its 40 beds there are 120 patients; fortunately, many of them actually prefer to lie on mats on the floor or on porches outside the buildings. There are no minor illnesses. "When a Montagnard comes in from his village," says Dr. Smith, "we take it for granted that he's malnourished, mostly from protein deficiency, that he has intestinal parasites and also malaria. After that, we ask what's wrong with him." Despite the confidence she has won through her skill and insight, Dr. Smith finds that many patients still...
...sometimes intrudes. In 1965, the hospital was caught in crossfire between Viet Cong and Americans. Dr. Smith herded all her patients into the wards and got all but one, a boy in traction, onto the floor to reduce the risk of casualties from machine-gun bullets. When Americans urged her by phone from Kontum to take refuge in the city, she snapped: "Don't be ridiculous! I can't leave my patients." Then a stray bullet hit a woman in the thigh, and Dr. Smith was on the phone again, this time barking at an American commander: "Stop...
...anyone had told Patricia Smith when she entered the University of Washington that she would some day be pinned down by machine-gun fire, she would have hooted. Her first choice was journalism but, bored with that, she switched to premed. After internship, Dr. Smith became bored again, this time at the prospect of "tending to well babies and anxious mothers," so she worked for two years at a miners' hospital in depressed Appalachia. When that closed, Dr. Smith went to a Catholic women's organization, the Grail, and volunteered for overseas mission work...