CROSSCULTURAL DOCTORING.ON AND OFF THE BEATEN PATH
William LeMaire
Author Bio
I was born on November 3, 1933 in a small town close the major port of Antwerp in Belgium. All of my primary and high school education was in Antwerp. I lived through WW II and the German occupation.
I went to medical school at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, where I graduated in 1958. My internship was in Schenectady, New York. When I finished the internship, Belgium still had an obligatory military service. Instead I signed up with the Belgian colonial health service and was assigned to a government hospital in the interior of the former Belgian Congo, now called, after their independence from Belgium, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I left there in the middle of 1960 shortly after that country obtained its independence.
After completing a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Miami in 1965, I completed a two year fellowship in reproductive endocrinology in Miami and then joined the faculty of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department of the UM. I rose rapidly in the academic ranks and was promoted to full professor in 1974.
Wanting to retire early from my academic position, I left the full time practice there at the end of 1989 at the age of 55. However I remained in the faculty and to date I am an Emeritus Clinical Professor of the University of Miami.
After leaving the University of Miami, I worked for various lengths of time as an obstetrician and gynecologist in a number of locations around the world and and in the USA. These locations include : Okinawa Japan; Karachi, Pakistan; Sitka, Alaska, Queensland, Australia; Tasmania, Australia; New Zealand; St Lucia in the Caribbean; Chiapas, Mexico. Many of my assignments were organized through an organization out of Salt Lake City in Utah, called Global Medical Staffing. This organization recently ran an article about our travels and experiences in their newsletter. the link is : http://www.gmedical.com/newsletter/LeMaire
Currently (2014), I am retired from clinical practice, but have joined the voluntary faculty at Florida International University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and am involved with the selection process (interviews) of aspiring medical students.
I am board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology and in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. I have a license to practice in Florida and in Alaska.
I have belonged to a number of professional societies and have carried a number of editorial and peer review responsibilities. I was honored with a Fogarty Senior International Fellowship for one year in 1997 at the University of Goteborg in Sweden. I am an author of about 150 publications in various professional journals.
I am married to Anne and have four children and eight grandchildren. I am fluent in English, Dutch and French and conversant in Spanish. My wife and I are both in excellent physical health. We enjoy outdoor activities and we were both competitive swimmers. We do a lot of traveling within the USA and in other countries.
Description
In Cross Cultural Doctoring you will read about my career as a successful obstetrician and gynecologist in academic medicine at a major university.
You will read why I decided at age 55 to leave my position, jump into the unknown and get off the beaten path. I will relate how my wife, Anne, and I accomplished this and how I kept working for various lengths of time in a number of different cultural settings around the world and how we traveled extensively between assignments.
The book is written as a series of loosely connected anecdotes, some medical, some non-medical. Some are funny and some are not so funny. When appropriate, I have added some reflections about our experiences.
I try to convey to the reader the excitement we have felt about our adventures. I hope that the book will inspire readers, medical and non-medical, to consider at some point of their careers to take the step to get off the beaten path. Anne and I certainly have never regretted our choices and have never looked back. Reading this book might also inspire people with similar experiences than ours, to write and publish their story.
I hope that you will enjoy reading the book as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
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One of the highlights of my medical work abroad has been the four months I volunteered at a small Catholic Hospital in Chiapas Mexico. The nuns there did an incredible job running the hospital for the impoverished Mayan population under difficult circumstances. They need all the help they can get. Thus I have decided to make this book available for free downloading and suggest to the reader that they consider making a donation to San Carlos Hospital in Chiapas, in lieu of the customary downloading fee. The book can be found for free on Smashwords. It is also available on Amazon but unfortunately they want to charge a minimum fee of 99 cents.
Donations can be made easily by clicking on the link below, going to Donate and following the instructions.
The web site for San Carlos Hospital is : http://www.hospitalsancarlos.org
Book excerpt
Excerpt from Chapter Three: Off the Beaten Path in Africa.
….. After my first few days in the hospital and village, I learned that a rumor had made the rounds that the new doctor is “muganga mtoto kabissa,” meaning: ”The new doctor looks like a child.“ I was then, at age 25, very young looking indeed. During my internship, patients would often respond when they first saw me with “Are you a doctor?” or “I would really like to see the doctor.”
In the Belgian Colonial system, like in many other administrations of that era, the efficiency was such that by the time a replacement doctor arrived, the doctor to be replaced was already gone for several weeks. Of course that did not allow for good continuity. I was lucky, as the doctor I was to replace, was scheduled to remain with me for several more months. It is likely that the administration in Bukavu had decided that the new doctor for the hospital (me) was too inexperienced to strike out on his own right away. This was good decision indeed and certainly good for me as the reader will see later.
However, when I arrived, the doctor had been on vacation and was planning to return in a couple of weeks. Thus the hospital had been without a doctor for a while. Soon after arriving in Shabunda I asked the health aides if there were any urgent or difficult cases for me to see. Their response was that everything was under control; except for one case of a rather elderly man who was admitted with what they thought was an amoebic abscess of the liver. An amoeba is an intestinal parasite that can lodge in the liver and cause an abscess. I went to see the patient right away. He looked rather moribund and had a large swelling in the right side of his abdomen. I had never seen an amoebic liver abscess, but knew about it from my course in tropical medicine. The patient had already received the usual medication to kill the parasites in his body, but I knew that the abscess needed to be drained. I had the health aide explain this to his “entourage.” I say entourage, because patients in this area, and in other developing areas in the world, often come to the hospital after traveling, sometimes walking, for long distances. If they are very sick they may need to be carried and frequently they would come with their entire family and even with many villagers. This particular man had about twenty people around him. So he was placed on a gurney and wheeled to the operating room followed by a procession of his family and friends. They all sat down silently and solemnly on the floor outside the operating room.
Inside a male health aide was getting the patient ready on the operating table, while I was scrubbing my hands. I was still doing this when the health aide came over and told me not to bother as the patient seemed to have expired. Indeed he had, and was beyond resuscitation. We needed to go outside and tell his family and friends. As I did not speak any Murega, one of the local languages, I asked the health aide to do the talking by my side. The twenty or so people who had accompanied this man were still sitting solemnly and silently on the floor outside the operating room. I did not understand what was being said, but after about the second sentence this entire group of people that had been so subdued till just before, jumped up shouting and crying, beating their chests and some even their heads against the wall. To me this was a most frightening scene as I was sure that they thought that I had killed their friend, father, or husband. I was also sure that, from the way it looked, they were going to come after me. My cowardly reaction was to run back in the operating room, jump out of the back window and drive home to tell my wife: ”Let’s get out of here, they are going to kill me.” This demonstration outside the operating room had been very frightening to me, but I quickly realized that in fact it was a normal cultural reaction. I did witness similar reactions several times since, not only in the Belgian Congo but also in several other countries where I have worked.
Author Website
http://www.freewebs.com/wimsbook/
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Crosscultural Doctoring. On and Off the Beaten Path