Doctor Calling. Over.

Voice: I've got a very delicate baby boy up here, doctor. Ten months old. Has a severe cold and 102.6 temperature under the arm. I hesitate to give him anything. Over.

Doctor: Doesn't look like measles, does it? No rash? Over.

Voice: Negative. I checked that. Over.

Doctor: O.K., use one of the oral medicines. Try triple sulfa. Give him plenty of fluids and two grains of aspirin every four hours. Call me in three days. Out.

The short-wave radio voice belonged to an Alaskan schoolteacher doubling as practical nurse in the remote hamlet of Marshall on the Yukon River. The doctor was William Henry Brownlee Jr., 37, making his rounds among the 10,000 people who depend on his hospital at Bethel (pop. 1,000). Radio is the only way he can do it; his territory embraces 50,000 sq. mi.--bigger than New York State.

Agony Hour. Alaska is virtually doctorless. In the great land's entire western half (250,000 sq. mi.), only Nome boasts a private practitioner. The job is mainly up to seven public-health physicians, including Dr. Brownlee, at five tiny U.S. hospitals run by the Alaska Native Health Service. They serve only 30,000 people, but visiting patients is usually out of the question. For hours at a time, every night, the "agony hour" radio dialogue goes on:

Hooper Bay: I wrote you about Esther Smith's female trouble. She says a wound is still giving her trouble. Now she's pregnant. Can you recommend anything? Over.

Doctor: Only surgery after her pregnancy. Not much we can do now. Out.

St. Michael: Alice Turner has been sick two weeks. Started with side ache and vomiting. Temperature 101.4, but it's down now. I've been giving her penicillin. Over.

Doctor: Has she had to pass water frequently at night? Over.

St. Michael: Negative. It's a chronic thing; happens once or twice a year. Over.

Doctor: Well, we'd better stop temporizing with it. Next time fly her in. Out.

Stony River: Hey, doctor, Liz Nolan left her poke down at the hospital. Have you seen it? Over.

Doctor: Her what? Oh, bank roll. I'll look for it and let you know. Out.

So public is this public medicine that even healthy Alaskans from Barrow to Kenai tune in their radios to little else. For titillation, they say, professional entertainment hardly compares. One schoolteacher-nurse's wife, forced to listen during dinner, queasily agrees: "If you've never listened to symptoms while eating chocolate pie, you haven't lived."

Sole Life Line. The free counsel is also serious medicine. Radio constantly fingers patients who need hospitalization, gets doctors out fast to the bush by plane. Alerted by radio last month, Fairbanks' Dr. Jean Persons, a minister's thirtyish daughter who has braved many a stormy night flight, rushed to a man who had tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chin. She landed in time to stop the blood, took him back for plastic surgery.

During the autumn freeze-up and spring crack-up periods, when float planes cannot land on Alaska's lakes, radio diagnosis is the sole life line a doctor can toss. It has sharply decreased the mortality rate among Eskimos and Aleuts, saved them much suffering from such chronic afflictions as infectious eye diseases. Says Bethel's Dr. Brownlee, who tuned up for Alaska by treating U.S. Navajos and Pacific Island lepers: "In private practice really sick people are sometimes hard to find. Once you get into this kind of medicine, you're not interested in worried people."

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