Medic: The Mission of an American Military Doctor in Occupied Japan and Wartorn Korea (review)

This book is much more important than its misleading title suggests. Medic is not the reminiscences of a MASH doctor but a perceptive narrative of the problems incurred by high-ranking public health officers and medical personnel in occupied countries in which medical facilities and trained personnel are extremely limited. How does one run the medical facilities of a defeated and occupied country? How does one deal with the problems of enemy and foreign nationals? Do you deal with military or civil enemy authorities? At what level, national, prefectural, local? Which agencies? Do you handle policy implementation via requests or orders? Crawford Sams skillfully describes his experiences as an Army medical officer and as "head of the Public Health and Welfare Section" of SCAP and advisor for health and welfare fields for occupied Korea. It is, as Sams puts it, "one man's version of what happened, as I saw it . . . biased by my own background, my own experience, and my professional interests."

Sams presents himself as an open-minded and enlightened man of principle who was also willing to learn and adapt himself and his policies to fit the situation and cultural milieu. He was well aware that the occupation was attempting to remake Japan and that he was part of that process. While others saw baseball as an instrument of democratization, Sams felt that making changes in the public health and welfare field in Japan could lead to the same result. This is a common theme that runs throughout this account. He also firmly believed that with an open mind and a willingness to try new ideas, and with scientific methods, problems could be solved. Sams was a man with stories to tell, and opinions to express, and this book is a collection of some of those stories. But these are not stories for entertainment value. Sams was concerned with the bigger picture and with winning the Cold War. He felt that U.S. government programs, if formulated judiciously and carried out in a manner respectful of the recipients, "can favorably influence other countries in spite of what appears to be an era of shortsightedness, expedience, and quick profits on our part."

Sams continually worked to reform, remodel, and improve medical training and the public health and welfare systems in Japan and Korea during his tenure as chief medical officer of the occupation, 1945-1951. His main concerns and responsibilities involved the operation of the Ministry of Health and Welfare in occupied Japan, with whose operation he was most directly involved. He covers both the successes and failures of occupation methods in the use of personnel and implementation of policy directives. As a soldier, he was concerned with maintaining the health of military personnel and this played a role in his thinking concerning public health issues.

Sams waited until after he retired to write Medic. He did this in order to write outside of military censorship with "a measure of freedom." In clear and readable prose, he describes and discusses his experiences in handling the problems of controlling the epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, typhus, and other wildfire diseases from spreading throughout Japan and Korea by the mass movement of returnees and refugees following the Japanese surrender and later during the Korean War. In the immediate postsurrender months, the control of epidemic diseases was a top priority. This was made difficult by the movement of Japanese from the countryside to the cities and vice versa. Compounding this problem were the thousands of Koreans attempting to return to Korea and Japanese returning from various places in Asia.

The American occupation of Japan and the Korean War have been written about extensively. Despite this, there are serious gaps in our knowledge concerning certain aspects of these two historical events. The publication of Crawford F. Sams's memoirs as the...