Drs. Frank and Bessie Beck medical contributions in Bolivia | More information about Dr. Frank and Bessie Beck

Bolivia's Most Unforgettable Character

by Clarence W. Hall

One afternoon a few years ago an American of some self importance strode into the crowded Clinica Americana, a Methodist mission hospital in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. Brushing past a line of patiently waiting Indians, the visitor exclaimed: "who's in charge here? I am--" and he mentioned a name well known in the entertainment world.

A tall, spare man arose slowly from bandaging an Indian child's leg. "And I," he said, "am Dr. Beck. Take your place at the end of the line, please." This story, repeated with relish in La Paz, sharply limns the character of the missionary doctor known throughout Latin-America as "the father of modern medicine in Bolivia."

Back in 1912, when Frank Beck first came to Bolivia, the country's 750,000 Aymara Indians were among the most neglected and depressed peoples on earth. Though they comprised one third of Bolivia's population they had no schools, no political rights, no health provisions. They were virtual slaves, bought and sold as part of farms or industries where they worked. Today, largely because of Dr. Beck's labors, the Aymaras have made an impressive start toward a place in the sun.

I had not been in La Paz an hour before I understood why this remarkable American has been named "the outstanding. foreigner in Bolivia." "You know Dr. Beck?" I asked a traffic policeman. "Si, si, senor," he beamed. "Does not everyone?"

In broken English he told how Beck had delivered his baby, worked until almost dawn to save his wife's life, then spent hours driving him about to spread the tidings among his numerous kin. "Ah, senor," said the cop, "there's a man who leaves his mark on you!" For more than four decades Frank Beck has been leaving his mark on Bolivians, first as teacher, then as doctor. Many of the country's leaders have either studied under him or received his medical ministrations, often both. President Hernan Siles Zuazo, a former student of Beck in the American Institute, told me, "He awakened us to our responsibility to human beings as human beings. Can you understand what that means to the future of Bolivia?" Among missionaries he is a shining example of that vast company of the dedicated who cannot rest until they have left behind all of life's comforts and gone to earth's end to serve their fellow man.

Frank Beck's sharp gray eyes first scanned far horizons while he was a student at Dakota Wesleyan University. A roommate named John Washburn went to teach at the American Institute in La Paz (founded in 1907 by Methodist missions) and wrote back: "If you're looking for a place to invest your life, Frank, this is it!" Excitedly Beck talked it over with a pert junior named Bessie Dunn, daughter of a Methodist preacher from Iowa. In 1912, freshly possessed of his college diploma, he accepted a teaching post at the American Institute in Cochabamba, just established as one of a growing string of Methodist schools in South America. A year later Bessie arrived at the port of Mollendo, Peru. "Guess we'll have to be married here," Frank told her. "Spanish custom doesn't permit a single woman to travel unchaperoned!" They were married by the mayor of Mollendo. During the ceremony Bessie became so entranced by the flowery Spanish flourishes that Frank had to nudge her and whisper, "It's time to say Si, Bessie." They made the 10-day trip into Bolivia's interior by train, boat, dugout canoe and mule-cart across the Andes.

In 1914 the Becks were sent to Buenos Aires to help start Colegio Ward, now one of the most famous schools in Latin America. They lived in a tent on the campus so that the apartment provided for them could be rented to raise funds for needy students. In 1917 they went back to Bolivia, and in 1920 Beck was appointed director of the thriving American Institute in La Paz. It was three years later that Frank Beck came to a decision that had long been building in him: he would switch his field of service from education to medicine.

He had been increasingly haunted by the dark image of a potentially great people, the Aymaras, shuffling through life with physical maladies, dying before their time, with the social and political cards hopelessly stacked against them. In miserable hovels on the city fringes and out upon the high plateau above La Paz, thousands of Indian families had never known a doctor. Infant mortality was as high as 80 per cent. In La Paz there was only the poorly equipped municipal hospital.

When his mission board back in the United States encouraged him to change his career, Beck announced that he would take a furlough and put himself through medical school. Returning to Chicago with Mrs. Beck and their two children, he enrolled at Northwestern University's medical school at the age of 35. Five years later, by tutoring on the side, he had completed his medical work and was interning at the Indianapolis Methodist Hospital. In October 1928 he and his family headed back to Bolivia and, after he served as a traveling doctor for a year, he set up shop in a tumble-down shed near the American Institute. His equipment: three rickety beds, an old pressure cooker for a sterilizer and a $35 set of instruments, discards from World War I.

One of his first patients was an Aymara woman in a condition of eclampsia labor-an attack of convulsions usually fatal in that area. While curious Indian faces stared through the window, he managed to save both mother and baby. This was the first of some 4000 successful maternity cases which in 25 years completely changed the attitude of Bolivian doctors and public on the importance of obstetrical care. In those days few women called in doctors at childbirth. As word of his skill got around, the little clinic became crowded. It was not uncommon to see a bejeweled ambassador's wife next to a colorfully garbed Indian woman. To reach Indians who would not or could not come to the clinic, he made trips on a sputtery motorcycle out on the Altiplano, sloshing through mud and wading hip-deep rivers to get to his unwilling patients.

He found conditions beyond his worst dreams: obstetrical cases botched by midwives or witch-doctors, every variety of cancer, hernia, ulcer, kidney and liver trouble. Whole families lived in unventilated, damp, one-room huts where even the mildest infirmities often became fatal. Because of the high altitude, whooping cough was especially deadly among children. At first the Indians, distrustful of any white man's intentions, refused to come close to this lanky gringo and his magic medicine. But his persistent friendliness, plus his talent for performing "miracles" of healing, in time won them over. There was, for instance, the Aymara woman who had been gored by a bull.

Almost completely disemboweled, her intestines were hanging out when Beck got to her. To an obbligato of her groans and wailing by the pueblo people, a witch-doctor was uttering loud incantations and feverishly slapping on herbs and leaves. Almost by force, Beck took the woman back to his clinic, sewed her up, and in two weeks she was back home. The people gaped in unbelief. "Why she not die?" they exclaimed. "Everything all on outside, now all inside!" As a result, more and more Aymaras came trudging into the clinic, or brought their sick to mutely lay before him along roads and rivers where he was known to come. Dr. Beck asked no pay of the Aymaras. In their gratitude, however, they sometimes put a chicken or a few eggs or ears of corn on his clinic doorstep or on the seat of his motorcycle side-car.

The medical profession in La Paz, what there was of it, gave him a hard time at first. They did not relish this outlander coming in to take patients from whom they could exact exorbitant fees. They liked even less his acting as though Indians' lives counted. His temporary license to to practice was alternately revoked and renewed for years. But he went right on practicing, license or no license. In 1932, with a war being waged between Bolivia and Paraguay, Beck was asked to provide medical assistance for tile Bolivian Army. The war was fought in a disease-cursed jungle area called the Gran Chaco-more realistically dubbed "the Green Hell." Soldiers died like flies from tuberculosis, malaria, intestinal infections. Beck, burning with malaria himself, fought to save casualties of both germs and bullets. He could operate only between four and six o'clock in the morning, after the clouds of mosquitoes had dispersed and before swarms of vicious gnats took over.

For his unsparing labors during the fighting he was awarded the "Condor of the Andes," the highest honor that is ever given to foreigners. In 1935, desperate to expand his 15-bed hospital, Beck gambled most of his meager funds on a trip to the United States to seek building money. When none was available from his mission board, he sought individual donors, and finally reached Mr. and Mrs. Henry Pfeiffer of the Hudnut family. Before them he spread out photographs, talked steadily for 15 minutes. Mrs. Pfeiffer finally halted him to say quietly, "We'll give you $30,000." Jubilantly, he returned to La Paz and began construction on a suburban site. To stretch his capital he pitched in himself, pushing wheelbarrows of cement, doing all the wiring.

To friends who marveled at his mechanical resourcefulness, he replied that if he had his way every missionary would be born and raised on a farm. "What I learned on the farm has been more important to me as a missionary doctor than much that I learned at medical school," he said. When his building fund ran low he invited local mine-owners and businessmen to send their employees for treatment, asked for construction help in return. Receiving a small inheritance from his father, he threw it into tile project, as well as every spare dollar he could find from any source. Meanwhile, Beck kept up a barrage of appeals to friends back home. From a man in Montclair, New Jersey, came an electric generator for use during power failures; from a woman in Pittsburgh an elevator. American and British residents of La Paz contributed furniture, an oxygen tent, an incubator, an inhalator.

When the hospital was completed it was the most modern in Bolivia, capable of handling 80 patients. Beck's particular pride was the home and school for 30 nurses. When he had arrived in Bolivia, nursing as a profession was virtually unknown. Young women with education sufficient to qualify for training (mostly Spanish, from wealthy families) scorned nursing as servant work." To get the necessary technical personnel, Beck brought in underprivileged girls, imbued them with the idea that here was a chance at a professional life not otherwise open to them, then rigidly drilled them in the arts of healing.

By 1955 the nursing school of Clinica Americana had turned out 103 graduates. Today hospitals, health centers and clinics throughout Latin America clamor for nurses trained there. At one time the public-health section of Servicio Cooperativo Interamericano, U.S. foreign-aid agency, had 34 Beck trained nurses on its staff, declared them "the best in the world." Dr. Beck is gratified by such accolades, but even more by the fact that the Bolivian government is closely copying his nurse-training program in its public health service. He says: "The biggest contribution that medical missions can make is to stimulate others to do for themselves." At Clinica Americana, mornings were for operations often as many as six a day; afternoons for out-patient consultations, which averaged 7400 a year. Beck's charge to all was 1000 bolivianos (about 20 cents ) - if his patients had it. On Wednesday afternoons, his only time off duty, he visited La Paz orphanages to conduct clinics, perform minor operations, bandage up wounds, making no charge to either patient or institution. Beck's nurses said of him, "Only God could be more omnipresent."

From the first he insisted on living in a small apartment on the clinic's top floor where he could hear every night sound, tell by a nurse's step down the corridor whether he was needed. "When you're trying to do a job," he said, you have got to be on the job." Told he would kill himself by overwork, he snorted: "Work doesn't kill a man; worry does." Bed patients soon learned to detect his short, quick step in the corridors, were comforted by his habit of softly singing hymns, humming or whistling as he performed operations. One, asked if her emergency appendectomy was an ordeal, replied, "How could it be? The senòr doctor's voice was more soothing than the anesthetic."

Between clinical chores in La Paz, Beck continued his trips to the Altiplano to conduct wayside clinics, deliver babies, take out teeth, patch up broken bones, pep-talk the people into better self-health measures. Some time ago a delegation of Indians tramped four days to ask Beck to start a school at Ancoraimes, on beautiful Lake Titicaca. Their children needed both education and medicine. "How else," asked their spokesman, "can we help our people to a better life?" Next day, Beck mounted his motorcycle, its side-car packed with tools, nails, rough siding. The Indians helped him throw up a one-room structure, then spread the word that education had at long last come to Ancoraimes.

When school opened, Aymara children were present in droves. School had no sooner begun than the town's mayor appeared, trailing a cordon of police. Beck was thrown into jail, spent the night fuming in his cell. In court the next day, he indignantly addressed the magistrate. "They say I have no right to start a school here, or vaccinate your children against smallpox. What in humanity's name . The judge smiled and lifted a hand. "You don't remember me, Dr. Beck? I studied under you at the American Institute!" He called the authorities to the bench, made them apologize. Then, turning to Beck, he said: "Please teach us better manners toward our benefactors."

Today, as a result of Beck's help, there are 18 Methodist schools on Titicaca's shores, plus a small clinic and a four-room cottage for the doctor. The schools and clinic serve 26,000 Indians, who come from 35 miles around. The settlement is named "Beck Memorial." Political revolutions in Bolivia occur with whimsical regularity. During his 44 years there, Beck survived many. Never taking sides, he deplored them mainly for their inevitable dumping of wounded on his doorstep. When he saw an upheaval coming, he alerted his staff, then took care of the casualties as they came, with no regard to the side they represented. After one unusually violent upset some years back, an officer of the successful coup stamped into the clinic to demand preferred treatment for his patriots. Beck grabbed his arm and marched him outside---fast. "I'm in command here," he said firmly. "Go!"

During the 1944 revolution, a cocky young soldier burst into the clinic. "It is believed you have fugitives here," he boomed. "I search!" Amused, Beck led him gravely through the wards, only slightly discomforted by the sub-machine gun the boy carelessly waved in his face. Beck was about to open the last door when the soldier lowered his gun, accidentally tripped the trigger, and blew off half his own toe. Enraged that anyone would so carelessly endanger his patients, Beck escorted the soldier to surgery and took off the rest of his toe-without benefit of anesthetic.

To Bolivian politicians, this blunt but courageous American was at first an enigma, then a delight. Almost every regime has sought his counsel, wanting to know what he thought of their policies. "Dr. Beck," a prominent leader informed me, "always gives it to us straight, as you Americans say. It's refreshing-and helpful. He's been more of a political power than he realizes. For he thinks with his heart." When the Siles government came to power in 1952, sweeping land reforms were initiated. Indians, for the first time in 400 years, now own their own land, are able to negotiate wages. In June of 1956 they were given the right to vote, something hitherto unknown in Bolivia's long history.

Though Beck thought the reforms went too fast and too far, they dramatically reflected his long striving for the rights of the oppressed. Early in 1956 Frank Beck announced his retirement and return to the United States. It was his third try at leaving the clinic and the people he loved. The first was in 1944 when, suffering from arthritis of the spine, he was told he would have to quit the high altitude. But, after seven months in the States, word reached him that the burden had proved too much for his successor. Beck hustled back to his clinic.

His second try at retirement was in 1950. A Texas mining concern promptly offered him a job at $12,000 a year-a handsome sum for a man whose salary as a missionary had not averaged above $750 a year, on which he and Mrs. Beck had educated three of their own and two adopted children. But he turned it down to serve with the Associated Medical Missions office in New York, charged with certifying mission-ary doctors. For two years he chafed under the desk routine, brooded over how things were going in La Paz.

Then his second successor also resigned under the strain-and once again he happily headed back to Bolivia. Before his last retirement, Dr. Beck took the precaution of having his passport stamped with the reingreso visa, per-mitting him to return at any time. "Just in case," he said with a grin. The Becks were given a royal send-off, with many speeches. U.S. Ambassador Gerald A. Drew asserted: "I have served in many countries, but in none has one man done so much to benefit the people of a land not his own.

An Aymara chieftain said simply: "He brought my people back to life." Frank Beck wound up his 44 years in Bolivia typically. On the day of his departure, there were five operations to be done. One of the last was performed on a 8-year-old Indian boy whose tongue, horribly tumored and projecting inches from his mouth, had to be removed to save his life. The child being an orphan, Beck had arranged for his 6-year-old sister to stay in the room with him. After the operation he found her there, one small brown hand smoothing the child's forehead, while bravely she struggled to hold back the tears streaming down her face.

I watched as Dr. Beck gathered the little form into his arms, heard him say gently, over and over: Estara' bien, mama pequena". "It's going to be all right, little mother. It's going to be all right." In essence, this has been Frank Beck's lifelong message to Bolivia's poor and oppressed. All over Latin America thousands today will affirm that he went a far way toward making the promise come true.

Published by Harper & Row, New York, 1959.

Drs. Frank and Bessie Beck medical contributions in Bolivia | More information about Dr. Frank and Bessie Beck