D.P. at Home

A soft-accented young physician with a pretty blonde wife and a two-year-old daughter moved last week into a rambling white clapboard house in Fabius, N.Y. Before his office was finished, a blizzard swirling outside brought him his first emergency case: a townswoman who had fallen on ice. For both Dr. Joseph Brudny, 33, and the twin villages of Fabius and Pompey (combined pop.: about 3,000), the beginning of his practice was the fulfillment of a dream.

Hospitable N.Y. Fabius and Pompey, about 17 miles southeast of Syracuse, had been without a doctor for five years. Last fall Dr. Brudny, then admitting physician at Brooklyn's Cumberland Hospital, was driving around upstate New York, trying to find a place to settle. The Onondaga County Medical Society referred him to Fabius. Dr. Brudny liked the place, but he had no money to buy a home and office. A Polish-born D.P. and a survivor of Nazi labor camps, he had been in the U.S. less than two years.

'The town fathers put their heads together, then their dollars. A corporation was formed which sold $9,000 in shares at $25 each to the people of Fabius and Pompey. The corporation bought a house and remodeled it. Dr. Brudny moved in, with the understanding that if he still likes the place after a year, he may buy the house from the corporation. If not, he may move out, and Fabius-Pompey will look for a new medical man.

Among the 233 physicians who have reached the U.S. from D.P. camps, Dr. Brudny was one of the luckiest. New York is the most hospitable of all states to D.P. doctors. It requires a minimum of examinations;* further medical training is usually limited to an internship. If its examiners are satisfied, New York (like seven other states) allows a D.P. to begin practice with only first papers toward his citizenship.

Unfriendly 21. In 17 states, a displaced physician is not admitted to practice until he becomes a U.S. citizen, which usually takes five years. (Marriage to a U.S. citizen reduces the time to from one to three years.) Two states, Indiana and Michigan, require an immigrant to take the senior-year course of instruction at an approved

U.S. medical college--now virtually impossible because of overcrowding. In 21 states, no foreign-educated doctor can practice under any circumstances.

The American Medical Association has set up machinery to help "the resettlement of these individuals in a spirit of friendly cooperation with unfortunate colleagues." But the A.M.A. gets no friendly cooperation from most state medical societies. Among the least hospitable states are several in which rural communities have been crying for doctors--such as Wisconsin, where Dr. Joachim Bronny was rejected in 1948, despite pleas made for him by the doctorless village of Fairchild.

For every happy Dr. Brudny there is many an unhappy Dr. Bronny.

* Of 417 foreign-educated doctors who took the examination in the year ending last June, 178 passed, 239 failed. In the whole U.S., only 636 were examined that year; 308 passed.

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