Dr. POW (book excerpt: Conduct Under Fire)

New York author John Glusman tells the story of four Navy doctors, including his father, who were prisoners in Japanese camps during World War II.

By John A. Glusman, AMNews contributor. Aug. 14, 2006.

Book Excerpt
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Physicians Murray Glusman, MD, Fred Berley, MD, George Ferguson, MD, and John Bookman, MD, did their best to survive and tend to fellow soldiers. This first excerpt details the health problems and other struggles the physicians and other captives faced.

The doctors at Bilibid had their individual specialties, but they quickly gained familiarity with a range of diseases that were almost numbing in their consistency.

There was one case, however, that Fred would never forget. Corporal Lloyd D. Adams had been bitten on the face and leg by a rabid dog when he was on a work party at Balanga. He was placed in Bilibid's isolation ward and given a course of rabies vaccine provided by the Japanese, but it did little to stop the virus from multiplying in the brain and surging through the efferent nerves to the salivary glands. Adams went insane. He salivated uncontrollably and developed hydrophobia. His spasms -- triggered by the most innocuous stimuli -- became so violent that the disease seemed to have seized his body, to speak and act for it in a bizarre parody of human behavior. Ted Williams could barely see from xerophthalmia, but at night and at bango [count-off] he could hear the most horrible screaming. The spectacle induced in Fred a sense of awe in the face of the incurable.

Doctors quickly learn to separate the personal from the professional, but some relationships at Bilibid blossomed into friendships. Corporal Donald E. Meyer, who had been stationed at Nichols Field with the 693rd Aviation Ordnance, suffered a depressed skull fracture and a dislocated hip on Corregidor. When he arrived at Bilibid in October 1942, Carey Smith and Lieutenant E. R. Nelson tended his hip fracture first. Later Nelson and George Ferguson operated successfully on his skull. Meyer recovered beautifully. "I knew he would be a friend to me always," he said of George.