WALTER:  Now we're back to Bethel. 

KAREN:  Right. 

WALTER:  1954 to 1956. 

KAREN:  Okay. 

WALTER:  In the spring of ‘55, and again in ‘56, just before breakup, I would go down to the Lower Yukon and visited the villages there.  Kwiguk, since renamed Emmonak, and Alakanuk and the adjacent villages.  And would stay for, oh, a week or more. 

There -- well, in each village there was usually somebody who would help me as an interpreter and all the other chores that go with holding a clinic. 
In Emmonak, there was no BI -- BIA school.  Only a two-year elementary school in a log cabin taught by Betty Guy, later a health aide from Kwethluk.  And who was just beginning to introduce English. 

The -- the prime movers in the village were -- were Pearlie and Axel Johnson, both Natives of the area, who were handling the medical problems the best they could.  So I would let them use the otoscope, the stethoscope, and we would examine patients together. 

And from that, and also from having lived in Wiseman where I lived with Mrs. English who was a very traditional Inupiaq Eskimo, realized how keen observers local people were, and that they could make observations as well or as any physician. 

And so when I came back from the field trip to Emmonak, I wrote a letter to the ANS headquarters in Juneau proposing training for local persons. 
And my main point was that it really was not a question of -- of their having fully trained people or not, it was going to be somebody with less than full medical training or nothing at all because there's no way there was going to be a doctor around the year in these remote places. 

Dr. Ted Henson answered the letter saying that he was sympathetic with the idea, but questioned how it would be accepted by the medical community.  And when or if it could actually be put into effect.  I don't have a copy of the letter; I do have a copy of his answer. 

I didn't hear any more about this.  I went out to the state's -- I joined the -- the U.S. Public Health Service in 1955 when that agency took responsibility for Native health care from the Alaska Native Health Service, BIA.  That gave me an opportunity to apply for residency training while in the service. 

And so I went out to Boston for the internal medicine training and spent some years out there to qualify and pass my specialty boards in internal medicine, returning to Anchorage in 1962.  As chief of medicine.