Doctor Tom Dooley, My Story

by Thomas A. Dooley

Doctor Tom Dooley, My Story is an abridgement, especially prepared for young readers, of Deliver Us from Evil, The Edge of Tomorrow, and The Night They Burned the Mountain.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Thomas Anthony Dooley, III.

Doctor, US Navy officer, and humanitaian.

Graduate of Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

For his humanitarian service in Southeast Asia, he was awarded the Legion of Merit (United States), the National Order of Vietnam, and in 1962 he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President John F. Kennedy.

Reviews

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dr. Tom Dooley set out to do something few others of his time had attempted: a humanitarian medical mission to a remote foreign people. Except for Albert Schweitzer and of course, the time-honored missionary tradition, Dooley was probably the first doctor to bring modern health care to the developing world. He was unique in that his motives were not linked to the church (although Dooley was a devout Catholic and fairly vocal about it). No, Dooley simply wanted to bring quality American medicine to people who had little or no health care of any kind, in Laos--a country few Americans had visited or even heard of.

Dooley's prose is lively and detailed and full of humor, tinged with a paternalistic pride and a fair amount of good-natured condescension. Since this was the 1950s no one had really thought about development from a help-them-help-themselves standpoint, so Dooley considers his beneficiaries pretty helpless, although you can tell that he's thinking about training as opposed to just doing-it-all-for-them. His heart was firmly in the right place.

The book reads like an adventure and it certainly must have been at that time. Dooley and his crew of nurses, assistants, and assorted specialists had to deal with jungle trails leading to villages totally cut off from the outside world. The Laotian people welcomed him even though he must have seemed like a creature from another planet. Many more such adventures would have followed, had Dooley not developed cancer and died quite suddenly in 1961, age 34.

For me, the book was an inspiration to go off and do much the same kind of work in a totally different world some 25 years later. Dooley was neither The Ugly American of Lederer and Burdick, nor was he The Quiet American of Graham Greene, both of them in Southeast Asia at about the same time as Dooley. I think of Dooley as the Good American, the one who died too young.

[Nancy Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this book since I was in high school and it was falling apart. I thought I would read one more time. I loved, loved this book. What an amazing man!

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a quick read but I found it very compelling. The true story of this doctor and what he did for people in Asia was very inspiring. The conditions that those people lived in...and though it was 50 years ago it's sad to know that people still live in such conditions. We are so blessed to live in the country we do, to have the basic necessities that we don't even give a thought to, that are taken for granted. Tom Dooley gave selflessly of his time and knowledge and talents as a doctor to help others in need. Great book.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about a doctor in Vietnam right after it split between N and S Vietnam. And then his time spent in Laos later on. Learned a few things...