Public Health Service

(In response to an sff.net conversation about movies and doctoring and nursing in the south -- )


It wasn't simple back then, roaming – I was sort of there, like the littlest kid in the movie. I had black nurses in San Juan and New Orleans from my birth in 1943 to about the age of three – I was three and a half months' premature, and required a lot of care, and our [white] family had at least part-time [black] help come in until we moved to Anchorage when I started kindergarten. (Anchorage was pretty primitive in those pre-statehood days, and I suspect there wasn't a lot of domestic help mushing around.)

(You wouldn't say "black" in those days, incidentally; that adjective was an insult implying slavery. "Colored" was respectful. Funny how things change.)

We weren't rich. My father had both an M.D. and a Ph.D., but he had gotten those degrees in a spirit of public service, and he spent that part of his life as a uniformed officer in the Public Health Service. My family was never poor, at least after he got his doctorate, but we were never more than middle class, which I think annoyed me when I was a teenager – other doctors' kids were rolling in money! – but I later realized that in his quiet way he was a man of principle. (Not so quiet in the fifties, when as Assistant Surgeon General he put his job on the line and censured Joe McCarthy in the Senate anti-Communist hearings. When I heard him do that my hair stood up with pride, though I was too young to really know what was going on.)

Joe