Medical Good Neighbor

Geologists in Venezuelan jungles, vice presidents in a Manhattan skyscraper, sailors on tankers, stenographers in Buenos Aires--some 150,000 men, women & children all over the world are under the care of the medical division of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, which has the most elaborate--and probably the biggest--industrial medical organization of any U.S. business.

Its medical personnel consists of 108 full-time doctors, 17 part-time doctors, two dentists, 123 nurses, 23 laboratory and X-ray technicians, 24 pharmacists, 32 first-aid men, 331 orderlies, nurses' aides, etc. It has 29 hospitals (1,121 beds) in Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Aruba (Dutch West Indies). It also had several in Sumatra. It runs the only accredited nursing school in northern Argentina. It also publishes the world's only intercompany medical journal, The Medical Bulletin, in which Standard's Dr. Robert C. Page last week reviewed the company's unflagging, pioneering medical work in the last ten years.

Organizer of Standard's medical department is benign Yaleman Dr. Willard J. Denno, 67, who first came to the company in 1918. He was soon joined by Dr. Alvin Schoenleber, 58, who learned tropical medical problems in Panama while the Big Ditch was being dug. When these two began their work, industrial medicine had a bad name. Only medical misfits went into the field. Largely through the efforts of Drs. Denno and Schoenleber, industrial medicine now attracts first-class doctors from all over the U.S.

In the U.S., Standard's medical service to its employes is not unusual: all occupational injuries are treated, other ailments are diagnosed. But in the tropics, Standard undertakes full medical care not only of its U.S. and foreign employes and their families, but also of a good many people who just happen to live near by.

The Doctor Goes First. Standard sends its doctors into the jungles with geologists and wildcatters even before a new oilfield is opened. The medical unit picks the camp site, finds and tests a water supply, supervises disposal of sewage and garbage, directs eradication of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, flies and other pests. More than 100 Standard workers do nothing but fight malaria by draining swamps, oiling mosquito breeding grounds, etc. In the last six years, amebic dysentery, No. 2 cause of tropical sickness, has dropped from 27% to 5% among Standard employes.

Year before last, 1,514 babies were born in Standard hospitals, mostly to Latin Americans. Mothers are given lectures and courses on prenatal and postnatal care--e.g., unless the poorer classes of Latin American women are told to stop nursing their children, they will suckle them for two or three years.

In Venezuela and Colombia, Standard has several air ambulances to whisk emergency cases from the field to hospitals. Between Barranca and El Centro, Colombia, it operates a unique rail ambulance.

Doctors Make Doctors. The southern republics now insist that all new doctors be "nationals." Anticipating this move ten years ago, Standard has been bringing South American doctors to the U.S. for specialized training. This year the company plans to take promising youngsters right out of South American undergraduate schools, bring them to the U.S. for their complete medical education.

U.S. nurses are still welcomed in South America. Some Latin girls turn up their noses at the drudgeries of nursing. But Standard doctors have discovered that Latin American streetwalkers often make gentle and reliable nurses.

In Wartime. In last summer's war between Peru and Ecuador (TIME, Sept. 1, 1941), the only medical facilities near the jungle battlefields were two hospitals in northern Peru belonging to a Standard subsidiary. Company ambulances, planes and trucks hauled casualties of both armies to its hospitals, which set up extra cots in halls and patios. "We spent days removing pieces of shrapnel and bullets from the wounded," wrote Dr. Lewis Eraser last week in The Medical Bulletin.

When a Nazi submarine shelled the island of Aruba last February, Standard's medical staff received 27 casualties for hospitalization, treated 22 others clinically, mostly for burns from flaming oil.

Two days earlier Standard's excellent medical facilities in Sumatra--twelve hospitals (278 beds), nine doctors, 21 nurses, 136 attendants--had been submerged by the onrushing Japanese. They have not been heard from since.

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