The Big Man & the Little Lady

Albert E. Holland and Fe del Mundo first met in the internment camp at Manila's Santo Tomas University in early 1942, just after the city had fallen to the Japanese. Fresh from the well-fed U.S. business colony there, he was still a husky 195-pounder, determined to talk the camp authorities into improving the lot of his fellow internees. She was tiny and frail, only 5 ft. 1 in. and under 90 lbs., a Filipino doctor with a brand-new practice. Dr. del Mundo, who had received much of her medical training in the U.S., was determined to help the helpless American children and expectant mothers in the camp. She sweetened the camp commandant with cough syrup and talked her way in.

Working with Holland, Dr. del Mundo got 400 U.S. and Allied children out of the camp and cared for them as long as the Japanese would let her. Then the following year the Japanese cracked down, herded Dr. del Mundo's patients back into Santo Tomas, and denied her access to them. The last time she saw Holland, he was down to a skeletal 95 Ibs. For most of the next 23 years, neither heard anything of the other. She thought he had probably died of starvation; he thought the Japanese had probably executed her.

Last week, by strange coincidence, the two met again in Geneva, N.Y. During the winter, the Medical Women's International Association had picked its president, Pediatrician Fe del Mundo, to receive its Elizabeth Blackwell award, named for the first woman to earn an M.D. degree in the U.S. The scene for the ceremony was the Geneva campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, for it was in Geneva in 1849 that Elizabeth Blackwell became a doctor.

The man who made the most heartfelt speech at the presentation of the award was Dr. Albert E. Holland, Dr. del Mundo's long-lost friend from Santo Tomas. After his release, Holland had turned from business to education, and last spring Hobart's trustees picked him to take over as president, beginning this month.

If Educator Holland has gone far, so has Pediatrician del Mundo. She has done research in bacteriology as well as pediatrics, and written extensively on both. She has set up the 100-bed Children's Memorial Hospital in Quezon City (a Manila suburb), with an institute of maternal and child health recently added, and has gone deep into debt to pay the running costs. Dr. del Mundo accepts donations and whatever fees patients can pay, but no govern ment money. Now she has a new volunteer fund raiser -- Albert Holland.

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