In California: New Doc on the Hill

By Dick Thompson

People around Feather Falls remember when anyone who got seriously injured was likely to be strapped into a canoe for a bumpy 20-mile ride down the lumber flume to the Marysville hospital. Those less ill were treated by the Widow Griffith--until she died at the age of 98. Says Marysville's Dr. Lynn Frink: "They would come in with half their face eaten away with a cancer that could have been treated successfully three years ago; or they'd be in bad shape from heart disease when all they needed was digitalis. If they should have been treated months before, you could bet they were from up that hill."

Medically, things are looking up for people on the Hill, a rough, largely unchanged slab of the California Sierras, dotted with gold-panners' shanties and crisscrossed by streams of flashing gold and speckled trout. Fortnight ago, for example, when Logger Bill Lingenfelter was pinned by a "widowmaker"--a tree falling in the wrong direction--his crew mates rushed him to Dr. John Rose. The "Doc" swiftly took 30 stitches in Lingenfelter's right leg and put splints on him.

The stitching was done at the new Yuba-Feather Health Center, three log cabins built as a staging site for fighting forest fires but recently transformed into a medical resource serving 8,000 people spread over 900 sq. mi. of mountain. It was paid for out of federal and private funds, which cover the salaries of two full-time physicians: Rose, 32, and his partner, Dr. William Hoffman, 34. Both the center and the young doctors who staff it are signs of a national effort to bring doctoring back to rural America.

Just before this winter's storms arrived, along with an anticipated 18 ft. of snow, the Yuba-Feather Health Center held its first open house. Furniture in the waiting room was pushed back for dancing. Hill people arrived from lumbering outposts, such as Shenanigan Flats, Timbuctoo, Challenge and Strawberry Valley. Carrying plastic wine glasses, they poked their heads into the X-ray area, the pharmacy and the psychologist's quarters. They wandered through the cook's shack, now transformed into a dentist's office. And they studied twinkling, gyrating machines in the laboratory, formerly a fire fighters' shower room.

Every bit of equipment was proudly introduced to potential patients by young Doc Rose. In the main hallway, a donated defibrillator drew special attention. Everybody knew that shortly after Rose arrived on the Hill, he was called out to help a man electrocuted while stringing a television antenna. The man's heart had stopped, and Rose needed a defibrillator to jolt it back to life with electricity. There was none on the Hill, so Rose drove his car next to the victim and ran jumper cables from the car battery to the man's chest. Even so, the voltage was too weak, and the man could not be revived.

Doc Rose's work load is a throwback to the days of black bags and horse-drawn buggies. In the 3 1/2 years since he came to Feather Falls, he has been careening around its twisty roads in a flower-speckled '68 VW Bug pretty much day and night. Rose talks in an easy country twang that belies his Princeton (B.A. '69) and Baylor (M.D. '73) education. After serving his residency in an urban Oakland, Calif., hospital, he came to Feather Falls and found himself delivering goats, prescribing for sick dogs and sewing up deer attacked by dogs. All that, of course, was in addition to morning rounds and surgery in the Marysville hospital, afternoon office hours, evening community-health meetings and late-night calls from the pregnant or the lonely.

Rose makes about $32,000 a year. "I could be making more money in the valley," he says. "But what else could I want? I think I'm just a hick at heart." Says an ancient patient, with an approving smirk: "The Doc is busier than a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs."

That kind of approval came hard. Whispered exchanges over backyard fences about the Doc's "live-in" girlfriend, a lab technician at the center, are just now dying down. Feather Falls is a company town, wholly owned by the Louisiana-Pacific Corp. Its 800 citizens live in white-trimmed, barn-red houses, paying an average $125-a-month rent. They did not know what to make of an antiwar activist like Rose who dressed in red flannel shirts, green silk dotted ties and baggy, unpressed jeans. His walrus mustache, gold-rimmed glasses and long brown hair brought to mind not young Dr. Kildare but Billy Shears from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper.

Long before John Rose was born, general practitioners began disappearing from the American landscape. But a decade ago, medical schools started offering a new specialty called family practice. Rose signed up, and so did many others. Today there are 54,000 family physicians in the U.S. (as compared with 21,000 in 1969). "The problem in medicine used to be the discovery of causes and cures of diseases," Rose explains. "Now it is the distribution and application of that knowledge. For that, the generalist is what's needed." Getting the information across can be a slow process. Rose is deep into organizing Grange dances and fishing trips. He plays on the local basketball team (9 won, 5 lost so far), and has led lobbying to keep Yuba County from paving the rutted country roads, thus bringing unwanted traffic to the Hill. On Rose's wall is tacked a sign. GOD GRANT ME PATIENCE . . . AND I WANT IT RIGHT NOW.

During the center's open house, Harry Hollis, 64, a retired carpenter, chatted at the punch bowl with Jim Miller, 48. Hollis, the day before, had held in his hands a strip of eleven color photographs taken of the inside of his stomach. Miller had recently spent a day patched to a portable EKG machine. Doc Rose's calendar showed an appendectomy first thing in the morning. It no longer seemed to matter how long it had been since his last haircut.

Dick Thompson

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