Politics & Practice

California's Imperial Valley teems with migrant farm workers who are often unemployed and often sick. Largely for such workers and their children, Imperial County runs a $155,000-a-year public health service. To head it, the board of supervisors last summer hired a man with top qualifications: Paul Francis O'Rourke, 36, who got through Harvard Medical School at 24 and quit private practice in 1959 to take a year's course in public health at the University of California.

His public health job suited Dr. O'Rourke. Organized medicine, he thinks, often closes its eyes to public needs; he criticized the American Medical Association for opposing more government-financed medical care. He was doubly dismayed to find that the Imperial County Medical Society, going further, was advising its members not to treat indigent youngsters who were drawing federal grants through Social Security's Aid to Dependent Children program, or adults whose fee-paying dollars came from Social Security.

For its part. Imperial County found O'Rourke a controversial fellow. He has an all-adopted family of five children that includes one Chinese-Hawaiian and one who is part American Indian. He antagonized local medicos by treating, for free, the youngsters and oldsters that most of them were refusing to treat even for a fee. Still, the County Medical Society let him in. Then a storm blew up over an unrelated matter: Dr. O'Rourke's Quaker-pacifist wife refused, on grounds of conscience, to pledge allegiance to the flag. Dr. O'Rourke figured that he had better offer to resign.

In the meeting of the county board of supervisors held to consider the resignation, a local medical society official stepped forward to offer some evidence: letters about O'Rourke from Dr. Warren L. Bostick, 46, president-elect of the California Medical Association and a member of the medical society in Marin County, where O'Rourke formerly practiced. Wrote Bostick: O'Rourke is an "eloquent proponent for having doctors go in under Social Security . . . It will be up to your county society to evaluate the total picture, including the implications of any statements or activities that he has engaged in . . . He is basically interested in massive social changes that from my point of view would be most disruptive."

The supervisors accepted the resignation. But the San Francisco Examiner leaped to O'Rourke's defense. State officials hinted quietly that without such a qualified man to head the county health unit, they would have to cut off its $39,000 a year in state aid. In the face of public indignation and pocketbook pressure, the supervisors reversed themselves. Dr. O'Rourke went back to work.

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