Gloria Park, Transcript Section 9

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Gloria Park,
Transcript Section 9

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KAREN: I wanted to ask you about the medicines. What kind of medicines did you have available at that time?

DR. PARK: To be stocked in the villages?

KAREN: Uh-hum.

DR. PARK: Basically penicillin and sulfa was for an antibiotic, for example. And we would usually leave and teach them about nitroglycerine pills, you know, the old-fashioned, having a heart attack, you put one under your tongue.

KAREN: Oh. Did it work?

DR. PARK: Help -- probably did. You know. And, of course -- and, of course, they had the basic TB drugs they knew how to use. INH and PAS. That's the other one I couldn't think of.

So it was kind of limited. And we did leave things like cough syrups. And I guess I mentioned the sulfa and the penicillin was the major antibiotics in those days.

KAREN: So this idea of having somebody in the village to work with you, how did that come about?

DR. PARK: Mainly because it was nice to be able to talk to the same person.

KAREN: Okay.

DR. PARK: And you'd get an idea on the phone who understood what was going on and -- and things to do.

KAREN: Okay.

DR. PARK: And working with them so that it was -- and of course, help with the clinics when we did get out to the village. And it just seemed to be one thing that you had to have was a contact in each village.

KAREN: How did that work with you on the radio with the person, the health aide in your village, and them telling you, this is the symptoms of a -- how were you able to know what was going on?

DR. PARK: You -- you tried to do it over the phone. And --

KAREN: And was that hard? Easy?

DR. PARK: Well, that's where we definitely needed to get more training in for the health aides, so that they could report what they were seeing better.
And I -- for example, one time I -- from what the health aide was telling me, I -- I thought that the patient was going to need to be flown in on a stretcher. And then when I said we'd -- we would have to arrange travel and bring them in, she said, oh, he's up and around.

So obviously, you get off on -- on a wrong tangent sometimes. And I -- I thought -- I thought it would be a stretcher patient. And I don't remember the details of that now, but I -- I did think we needed to get into a training program.

And -- and, of course, the obstetricians, the more -- whoever were doing some deliveries could handle a little of that. They -- they were involved in that training. Kind of from -- from the time we had obstetricians. Initially, we had none. So...

Yeah. The -- the early on teaching, some of it was for the teachers themselves in the villages that got so involved, and if there was no one else like a health aide or -- or similar to a health aide, they automatically were -- patients would go to them. I mean, the villagers would go to them for treatment.