Bostonian in Greece

The elegant Hotel New Angleterre, in Athens, was a favorite honeymoon spot at the turn of the century. Years ago, Boston's blueblood lawyer Robert Gray Dodge stayed there. Last week, one of its shabby, faded rooms with a wash basin in the corner was the office of his handsome, curly-blonde daughter, Lieut. Colonel Katherine ("Khaki") Dodge, 43, the U.S. Public Health Service's only woman Senior Surgeon on active relief duty.

Colonel Dodge herself was not in the office. As chief UNRRA health officer for the area from Athens to the middle of the Greek peninsula, she was off in a valley some 60 miles from Athens, helping sick, starved villagers who were out of reach of Allied supply lines.*

Dirt and Starvation. Like her three sisters (one, Eleanor, used to be Warden of Vassar), tall, vigorous Khaki Dodge is lively, enterprising, hard to discourage. Arriving in Greece late last autumn to be chief medical officer for the headquarters district of the Military Government, she found herself persona non grata. The British did not like skirts on this job. So she set off for ruined Sperkheios Valley. There she found that Captain Robert Mayers of the U.S. Army had already set up three hospitals while the Germans were still theoretically in possession (TIME, Jan. 29). But the people did not keep the hospitals clean, and were not only starving but also suffering from malaria, dysentery, typhoid, exposure.

Because both trusted her, she got along with both ELAS and the British. She was promised food and 14 trucks. The trucks promptly took off to cart goods for the black market at 26 times the official rate. Somehow she found mules to take their place, persuaded the Greeks to clean the hospitals, moved the sick to the hospitals from their miserable dwellings (sometimes holes in the ground, covered with twigs).

Death & the Dynamo. Civil war forced her back to Athens. She continued to visit the country hospitals, driving through firing lines many times a day. Several of her companions were wounded.

The Athens hospitals, with no food, coal, telephone, medical supplies or even water, were desperate. Many patients were phonies, with fake bandages and Tommy guns. Filth and refuse, including an occasional dead body or limb removed at the operating table, lay untouched below the hospital windows.

Dr. Dodge brought British supplies to ELAS hospitals herself. Her woman assistant spotted a coal heap, took a taxi out and shoveled it full. Dr. Dodge got the hospital staffs to throw out the fake patients and take care of the real ones. Again she got the Greeks to clean up their hospitals--delouse, scrub, bury the dead and the refuse.

Says a TIME correspondent who has seen the Dodge dynamo in action: "I saw her restore order in the midst of a hundred Greek Red Cross workers who wanted higher pay and persuade a British brigadier to put all his transport at her disposal to carry food to a village above the snow line ... all in twenty minutes."

Baffling Bridget. Educated at Vassar, Johns Hopkins, a London hospital, Manhattan's Bellevue and various baby hospitals, Dr. Dodge became an expert on rheumatic fever, taught pediatrics at New York University's Medical School, had a private Manhattan practice on the side. Resoundingly successful in her profession, she has met less success at the poker table and was baffled in the case of Bridget, a ten-year-old Briton whom she took in during the blitz. Bridget, though a nice child, proved many child-care textbook theories wrong, taught the child expert a good deal about children.

Colonel Dodge has had no chance to work at her specialty in Greece. She says she will get around to maternal and child welfare work only when the Greeks once more have clothes and food.

* UNRRA, long active in Greece, last week officially took over civilian relief.

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