The Flying Doctors

Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. --Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Injured while on safari in the East African bush, Hemingway's fictional hunter, Harry, died for lack of medical attention. In the same area recently, a real-life American hunter, Rifle Manufacturer Leo W. Roethe, narrowly escaped the same fate: his right leg was badly mauled by an attacking wounded male lion. Members of his party were able to radio the East African Flying Doctor Service, which dispatched a light plane to an airfield in the bush. The plane airlifted Roethe to a modern hospital in Nairobi, where he was patched up and sent home to Fort Atkinson, Wis., to regale friends and relatives with tales of his adventures.

Airborne Operation. Roethe's rescue was practically routine for the Flying Doctor Service, a Nairobi-based operation that provides medical care over a half-million-square-mile area in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. In the 16 years since the service was founded, the flying doctors have logged 2.25 million air miles and airlifted and treated 1,500 emergency cases. They have performed some 12,000 operations, attended more than 100,000 patients, and immunized an even greater number against the area's endemic diseases.

The aerial service owes its origin to Michael Wood, 54, a British-born plastic surgeon who began flying rescue missions in a second-hand light plane back in 1957. Under the sponsorship of the private, nonprofit African Medical and Research Foundation, the service now consists of eight planes, an international staff of eight physicians (two with pilots' licenses), from Denmark, Germany, France, Canada and Britain, and five non-M.D. pilots.

Much of the flying doctors' work is preventive. "To be an effective doctor in Africa, you must go to the patients," says Wood. "If you wait for them to come to you, they just die." The doctors and nurses make regular rounds of villages and rural hospitals to instruct people in proper sanitation and nutrition, and to conduct vaccination campaigns. But some of the missions are more urgent. The doctors have flown into the Tanzanian bush to operate on a nun who broke both legs in a fall into a well, performed an airborne operation on a youngster savaged by a hyena, and saved the life of a Kenyan fisherman who nearly drowned when his dugout canoe overturned in the surf and an anchor pierced his arm. They routinely treat casualties of tribal warfare and those fortunate enough to live through attacks by crocodiles.

To reach the accident victims quickly, the doctors rely on radio transmitters in 65 mission stations of all denominations located in the mountains, high plains and jungles that cover East Africa. Upon receiving a call, the service dispatches a plane to one of more than 300 airfields--some of them little more than dirt tracks--spotted around the countryside. Dr. Anne Spoerry, 55, a French-born general practitioner who pilots her own plane and has covered 336,000 miles since she joined the service in 1965, has had some peculiarly African experiences. On one flight, her plane collided with a vulture, which damaged the engine cowling; while landing, she once narrowly missed hitting a giraffe. When staying overnight at a remote airfield, Dr. Spoerry routinely rings her plane with thorn bushes "to dissuade lions and hyenas from chewing on the tires."

Service doctors usually get along well with their native counterparts --witch doctors. "I've even had some among my patients," says Wood. But there are exceptions. Dr. Spoerry once had to leave a patient behind and take off in a hurry to avoid being speared to death by warriors urged on by an angry woman witch doctor, who saw the airborne medic as a competitor.

The flying doctors are paid only $15,000 to $20,000 a year. But they often earn other rewards. A Masai warrior, who suffered a spear wound in the buttock, was so delighted with Wood's ministrations that he made him a blood brother of the tribe.

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