A Healer for Downstate

When Dr. Calvin Hastings Plimpton served as president of Amherst College, he brought a healer's touch to the liberal arts school in more ways than one. He used a calm, fatherly approach to the academic and financial problems that confront all college presidents, and when medical needs arose, he would pick up his black bag and make house calls around town. Now, as president of the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, Plimpton still makes house calls of a kind. Since his arrival in August, he has dropped in on faculty members, students and neighborhood leaders, not to prescribe but to learn. A hulking man (6 ft. 3 in.) with the courtly manner of an oldtime general practitioner, he says: "I'm the new boy in town, and I'm trying to find my way."

Downstate is a sprawling treatment and educational complex whose enrollment of more than 800 makes it one of the largest medical schools in the country. It has been sliding downhill for years. Dependent on the state's straitened treasury, it is typical of many institutions in the troubled urban public health scene. Leadership at the school was nonexistent, the faculty fragmented and dispirited. Relations with the nearby ghetto neighborhoods have been poor, and still are. Most area residents, convinced that they are unwelcome at Downstate's 350-bed hospital, avoid the place. One-third of the beds are often empty.

Shakespeare and Frost. It is not the kind of atmosphere to which Plimpton was born. He comes from the Massachusetts community of Plimptonville, named for his family, went to the Harvard Medical School and, shortly after World War II service as an Army doctor, joined the faculty of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has remained in academic life ever since. "Medicine and education are the same thing," he says. "A good physician is a good teacher."

To his thinking, a medical academician is also versatile. Plimpton, 53, can lace a speech with quotations from Shakespeare, Robert Frost, James Baldwin and other famous non-doctors. Just after he took over Downstate, he participated in a five-day canoe trip in the waterways around New York City, battling the fringe winds and rain of tropical storm Doria and enjoying himself thoroughly. "Even if there were no human bodies broken loose from their concrete sinking blocks in the Gowanus Canal," he says with feigned disappointment. "Canoeing around Brooklyn opens up many new boundaries for head and heart. I recommend it."

Sense of Community. To open some new boundaries at Downstate, Plimpton, of course, needs lots of money to attract a topnotch faculty and launch new programs. He would like to experiment, for instance, with satellite clinics that could provide medical counseling and primary care to people who might not otherwise get to the hospital. He dreams of finding the funds and the staff that would allow poor people to come in for preventive checkups before they are seriously ill.

Plimpton recognizes, however, that Downstate's problems are not exclusively financial. "What we need here," he says, "is a sense of community. The people of this area should regard this as their hospital. And we should realize that we can't think of ourselves merely as a teaching institution. We've got to involve ourselves in the community."

Though he owns a house in affluent Riverdale, Plimpton and his wife will soon move into an apartment only a block from the hospital. In addition to his "house calls" on clergymen, judges and local politicians, he meets regularly with a group of community spokesmen to discuss such problems as drug addiction, alcoholism and the treatment of patients at Downstate's own hospital and other hospitals with which Downstate is affiliated. Often defusing an angry exchange with a crack at his own expense ("Doctors tend to take themselves almost as seriously as educators"), Plimpton feels that the meetings have helped. "These people are concerned about things like respect for the patient's dignity and regular changes of bed linen," he explains. "I don't find most of their demands unreasonable."

Identity Search. He has also proposed another step to promote Downstate's identification with Brooklyn--changing its name. "Upstate suggests bare-armed buxom dairy maids frolicking bucolically in some pastoral glade. But Downstate suggests almost the anatomical opposite of Albany," he says. "Sort of a delta of discharge from the Hudson River. I would be much happier with a name that symbolized Brooklyn, and I could live with pride under the name Flatbush." Suggestions are welcome.

Thus far, Plimpton has produced little in the way of concrete change at Downstate. But his open attitude and sense of commitment have done wonders for student and faculty morale. "Downstate was a school in search of an identity," says Third-Year Student Cecelia Johnson, 26. "Now I think it has a future." Faculty members agree. Before Plimpton's arrival, several of the school's departments were without chairmen. Downstate now has more applications for jobs than it has positions.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.