Legendary ‘doktora’

To several generations of children—and their mothers—Dr. Fe del Mundo and Dr. Perla Santos-Ocampo were probably, quite simply, kind and caring “doktora.”  Yet these two doktora were National Scientists, an honor bestowed by no less than a presidential proclamation in recognition of outstanding achievements in science and technology. National Scientists are given full honors during their wake, and are entitled to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

We  recently lost these two great National Scientists—Dr. Del Mundo in August last year, a few weeks before her 100th birthday, and Dr. Ocampo just last June 29. She was 80 years old. I never met Dr. Del Mundo, and only had occasional meetings with Dr. Ocampo, but as great men and women go, both had a way of leaving their mark on people whom they may never even have met or dealt with only tangentially.

When I mentioned Dr. Del Mundo in a  lecture at a graduate class at the UP College of Medicine, one of the college faculty, Dr. Sonia Salamat, told me that as a child, she had been one of Dr. Del Mundo’s patients. I was surprised since Sonia is fairly young, but then I remembered Dr. Del Mundo was still making the rounds in hospitals well into her 90s. As Sonia put it, it seemed like every Filipino child, at least in Manila, had to be brought to Dr. Del Mundo at least once, often to the Children’s Medical Center which she established, the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines. A checkup by Dr. Del Mundo seemed almost like a cachet of a healthy child as well as a seal of good motherhood.

Early in her medical practice Dr. Del Mundo made a name for herself by coming up with a BRAT diet for managing diarrhea in children. The catchy acronym stands for Banana, Rice, Apple sauce and Toast. She later added another T, for tea.

Legend has it that Dr. Del Mundo was the first woman to have been enrolled in Harvard Medical School. Actually, she wasn’t enrolled to study medicine.  She had already graduated from medicine at UP but went to Harvard for further medical training. The story is that when she arrived she was brought to a dorm, which was all-male. I presume they found more suitable living quarters for her. We do know she did finish her training, and that it was to take another nine years before Harvard began accepting women as a policy.

That story should remind us that women, both in the States and in the Philippines, faced many uphill battles in simply getting into the medical profession. But those who did take up the challenge went on to excel, if not to lead and trailblaze in their specializations.

PSO

Which takes me to Dr. Ocampo, PSO to several generations of faculty and students at UP Manila. PSO passed away June 29 at the age of 80. She finished medicine at UP, and went on to train in the States as a developmental pediatrician and later founded the Philippine Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, which has played a vital role in training health professionals for early detection and the care of special children.

PSO joined the faculty of the UP College of Medicine and headed the pediatrics department for several years, pushing for distance education for health professionals.  When she became UP Manila’s first woman chancellor, from 1994 to 1999, she initiated the establishment of the National Institutes of Health, the National Telehealth Center and the National Graduate School for the Health Sciences.  These three institutes have been the medical school’s main link to the outside world, linking research to the training of physicians and to actual medical practice in clinics and hospitals.

A less-known side to PSO was her interest in linking medicine to the social sciences and to humanities.  Her National Institutes of Health had the motto “Science with a Heart for Humanities” and at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), she pushed for establishing a Multidisciplinary Child and Adolescent Unit, and a School for Chronically Ill Children.

Today, the UP College of Medicine has several innovative graduate programs in areas like genetic counseling and medical informatics, continuing a tradition that should be credited to PSO. This is where I can share a personal story.  Last year when a Master’s degree program in medical anthropology was approved by UP, then dean Dr. Alberto Roxas texted me about the approval. I immediately texted back, requesting him to call PSO to give the good news.  I explained that it was PSO, back in the 1990s when she was chancellor, who first pushed me to get a degree program going in medical anthropology.

I was not able to start the bureaucratic procedures until 2003 and it was to take almost a decade for the proposal to hurdle all kinds of obstacles, but we finally got the approval last year with gentle but persistent persuasion from Dean Roxas.

I actually first heard of PSO before I even met her.  She was well-known to pediatricians in the World Health Organization and Unicef, who were full of admiration for her. If Dr. Del Mundo came to be known for her BRAT for managing childhood diarrhea, PSO was associated with Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT), a simple but life-saving preparation of water mixed with the minerals sodium and potassium to prevent dehydration. ORT had many variations, and PSO was known for her involvement with worldwide efforts to get “super ORT” preparations that used local cereals.  Besides involvement in developing these super ORT preparations, PSO knew how important it was to get mothers, and physicians, convinced that such a simple remedy could save lives. I sometimes think that it was PSO’s involvement in oral rehydration campaigns, with all the challenges and difficulties, that made her so open to making the medical profession more multidisciplinary.

About two years ago I was asked to contribute an article for a pediatrics book to honor PSO, with an explanation that we had to work hard, and fast, because PSO was quite ill. I was asked, specifically, to do an article on the socio-cultural aspects of pediatrics. I got the article done within a few months but, alas, the book has met delays, and will now have to be a posthumous homage to PSO.

In her lifetime though, PSO did get many awards, several of which involved “firsts.”  She was in the first batch of TOWNS (Ten Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Services) awardees, the first woman president of the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), the first Asian president of the International Pediatrics Association.  Looking through the Internet for more information about her, I even found out UP Los Baños  named a hybrid variety of the gumamela after her.

“Pioneering Pinays,” the UP Los Baños YouTube video explains in its introduction to this unique gumamela homage, which I think is so appropriate. The gumamela—its English name is hibiscus—is so underrated, yet it yields the most resplendent flowers, is a sturdy plant with fibers that have been used for paper-making, and the flowers make a refreshing tea, with some medicinal claims. Legendary, this gumamela, like our doktora National Scientists.

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Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph