Dr. Bill James, Part 1, Transcript Section 3

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Dr. Bill James, Part 1
Transcript Section 3

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DR. JAMES: The first time I went to Anaktuvuk Pass was in March, I think, of '61. And somehow we got a -- got word that there was a flu epidemic going on in Anaktuvuk Pass, and they wanted a doctor to come up, so I chartered the plane and went to Anaktuvuk. And at the time, most everyone lived in sod houses. Then just went from house to house checking people.

At that time, we carried an awful lot of medicine supplies with us because there was nothing in the village. We had two big metal cases we filled with medicines and bandages and so forth. And then we also had the highway system.

KAREN: Oh, you did?

DR. JAMES: Yeah.

KAREN: Oh. I didn't know that was part of your service area.

DR. JAMES: Uh-hum. And so I came to Fairbanks, rented a car, and we drive down, go to Dot Lake, Tanacross, Northway, Tok. And Mentasta was in our service unit then.

KAREN: Wow. And what about the other side, down to Cantwell also?

DR. JAMES: No. I never -- I don't know if that was in the Anchorage service unit or if -- just didn't go there because there weren't enough people. I don't know.

KAREN: Yeah. And you had Nenana, Healy, that side wasn't included?

DR. JAMES: Nenana. We went to Nenana.

KAREN: Oh, Nenana was in there?

DR. JAMES: Uh-hum. But not --

KAREN: Past there?

DR. JAMES: -- not there. We didn't go past Nenana.

KAREN: It was a big service unit.

DR. JAMES: It was. And so most of my time for the first six months was travelling to the villages.

And when we started, we had no medical records, there were no medical records in the villages. In fact, we didn't even know what villages were occupied.

And I remember the director of nurses and the other doctor and I were standing in the hallway looking at a big map of Alaska, wondering if we should go to Venetie or Allakaket, and so forth. And the janitor came up and who was a Native guy from Tanana, he told us which villages had people in them and how the planes flew and so forth and how to get there.

KAREN: Yeah, you'd think that -- I find it surprising that the Public Health Service wouldn't have kind of prepared you guys. You weren't the first doctors there.

DR. JAMES: No, there had been doctors there for a while.

KAREN: Right. And that there wasn't sort of --

DR. JAMES: But there was some sort of a lapse between the -- the doctor who had been there before, Dr. Hadley who was there when I got there. So he had no orientation to us.

KAREN: Did the Public Health Service provide you any sorts of orientation? I mean, nowadays cross-cultural orientation is pretty popular.

DR. JAMES: Our orientation in Anchorage consisted of learning how to pull teeth, how to put in temporary fillings, and how to do refractions.

KAREN: Which is eye?

DR. JAMES: So I spent several meetings with Dr. Sheldon who was a private opthalmologist in town who taught us to do refractions.

KAREN: So refractions is checking people's vision?

DR. JAMES: Prescribing glasses.

KAREN: And your particular medical training, did you have a specialty?

DR. JAMES: No. I was straight out of internship.

KAREN: So you're back --

DR. JAMES: Most of -- most of the doctors at that time would take what they called a rotating internship.

So you would have -- I think I had four months of surgery and four months of internal medicine and two months of OB/GYN and two months of pediatrics.

KAREN: So do you feel like you were prepared for --

DR. JAMES: No. No. I felt very confident. It was -- felt pretty confident that -- the longer I was there, the more I knew that I didn't know. The more -- you know, when you get out of your internship in those days, you thought you were -- a lot of people would go straight into practice without a residency training.

KAREN: And nowadays people do residencies to get sort of specialized trainings?

DR. JAMES: And now everyone takes a -- if they are going to practice medicine takes a residency. If they want to be in family medicine, they take a family practice residency for two or three years after their internship.

And now internships are sort of incorporated into the -- into the residency, so you may have a three year residency in pediatrics and the first year is sort of considered an internship, and the next two years would be your residency but it's all pediatrics and nothing else.

KAREN: Okay.