Jungle Healer

WHITE WITCH DOCTOR (276 pp.)--Louise A. Stinetorf--Westminster ($3).

It is by no means certain that the cover artist for White Witch Doctor read the book. The red-lipped, white-helmeted girl on the jacket looks like a dewy-eyed deb on safari; actually, the heroine is a medical missionary in her 40s. The book is also called a novel and is offered as such by the Literary Guild. In sober fact, few fiction writers have ever displayed less control of the novelist's art than Author Louise Stinetorf. Nonetheless, her story of missionary life in Africa has enough candor, sympathy and even occasional excitement to win it a large number of midsummer readers.

When Spinster Ellen Burton reached the Congo, her equipment for work as a missionary consisted of a course at nursing school, a calm belief in God and a high quota of Indiana common sense. She needed all three. But she also developed a kind of talent that was not indicated by her attitude or training.

During her first night at her first missionary station, Ellen became hysterical when a python glided into her hut. But soon after, having bought some firearms and learned to use them, she became the village hunter and kept the whole area in meat, shooting game as big as hippopotamus. She knew nothing about surgery, but she studied old medical textbooks and, assisted by grit and prayer, tackled whatever came her way with uncommon success. She bought a wonderfully intelligent old Negro woman from her husband (for a few empty tin cans, a little salt and a length of cloth) and trained her to become a first-class nurse. With makeshift instruments and chronically insufficient supplies, together they tended the sick over an enormous area of jungle. Ellen was horrified when Aganza's primitive cure for a psychiatric case turned out to be a kick in the backside, but it seemed to work.

Missionary Burton, more successful with bodies than she was with souls, made few converts. But to all the natives she was Mama, a courageous white witch doctor who succeeded with hard cases and never asked anything in return.

Author Stinetorf makes only one pass at romance, quickly drops it in obvious discomfort. Her story might have been better as nonfiction, but its air of authenticity (Louise Stinetorf was an educational missionary in Palestine, spent her vacations in Africa) and its very unawareness of the niceties of fiction keep it from sounding like a bad novel. It is just primitive enough to be fresh.

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