DOOLEY, THOMAS A. 1927-1961
Medical missionary to southeast asÍa
A Vow to Help the Disadvantaged
To Americans in the 1950s Dr. Thomas A. Dooley was a "secular saint," risking his life to take the benefits of the Golden Age of Medicine to the neediest people in the world. During his service as a U.S. Navy ship's doctor in 1954 he treated refugees from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, tending as best he could to their cholera, leprosy, many tropical diseases, and war and torture injuries. Moved by their poverty and poor health, Dooley vowed that when his navy service was over he would return to help the people of Laos, a small neighbor of Vietnam. He provided many people in Southeast Asia with the first medical treatment they had ever received.
Medico
In the United States Dooley and several other doctors formed Medico, a nonprofit organization created to gather personnel and supplies for Dooley's planned hospital in Laos and other similar facilities projected for Asia, Africa, and South America. The profits from a bestselling book he had written about his experiences in Vietnam, Deliver Us From Evil (1956), helped start the group. In many of the areas in which the Medico doctors practiced, the local population or ruling government was strongly anti-American. (Dooley once refused to obey an order from the American ambassador that he leave Laos because Communists there wanted to kill him.) Dooley and his colleagues overcame hostility by dealing personally with their patients without attempting to push American or Western values. Their political neutrality often improved local attitudes toward the United States.
Treatment and Training
Dooley also believed in the importance of training local inhabitants to tend to their own medical needs. Whenever he treated anyone, he explained to his local trainees what he was doing. In this way native doctors could continue for themselves the process the Medico doctors had begun. The health care that Dooley and his followers practiced was primitive by American standards. "In the jungle, I practice nineteenth-century medicine," he explained. It's the best I can do under the conditions here. When I leave, the personnel I've trained practice eighteenth-century medicine. Good—this is progress, because most of the villagers live in the fifteenth century."
The Last Years
Dooley died in 1961 at age thirty-four after a long battle with cancer. He spent the last two years of his life traveling betweeen the United States, where he received medical treatment, and the Medico hospital in Laos. While in America he toured the country, lecturing and raising funds on Medico's behalf. Dooley was uncomfortable being a celebrity, but he was gratified by the contributions the publicity brought for Medico. To help educate the public about the disease that would eventually kill him, he allowed CBS to make a documentary, "Biography of a Cancer," about his first surgery in 1959. The Thomas Dooley Foundation, created to continue the work he had started, was established the year after he died.
Source:
Terry Morris, Doctor America: The Story of Tom Dooley (New York: Hawthorn, 1963).
