Doctor America

Larry Brilliant met Ram Dass, Love Serve Remember (pictured below) in a Himalayan ashram in the 1970's. Larry was a young doctor from Detroit on a trip of spiritual seeking. They shared a guru, known as Maharaji, who predicted that Larry would become a United Nations doctor working for the smallpox program (a program that was not even in existence yet), and become a key player in eradicating the disease that had already claimed over half a billion lives. That prediction would come true, and Larry went on to lead an extraordinary life of faith, love, and service to the world.

"... Zafar took the boy from my arms, sat down with the mother, and offered condolences in her dialect. When he uttered the Hindi expression, “Your son is no more,” her screams pierced the quiet. She had already known that he was dead; mothers always do. Yet when our jeep arrived, she hoped God would show mercy on her child, as mothers always do. I looked at the hundreds gathered on the lawn of the train station, where in better times Indian travelers would have congregated with their families, their possessions wrapped in bright fabrics, perhaps eating lunch out of a metal tiffin, or teasing children excited about their first ride on a train.

As I made my way through the crowd to the platform, beggars reached for small coins—the usual toll for passing. I put a fifty-paisa coin in an elderly man’s hand, checking for smallpox vaccination marks or telltale scabs or scars of an old infection; his companions were unvaccinated. At the front of the station, where there should have been a line of passengers waiting to purchase tickets, a dozen or so bodies had been carefully stacked like cords of wood, neatly wrapped in shrouds made of their own dhotis or saris. The unclaimed corpses awaited family members to come and perform the final rituals; failing that, they awaited the shudras, or untouchables, to gather and cremate them.

Looking up toward the ticket office I watched a living skeleton of a man buy a ticket. As he turned away, clutching his ticket, I saw the pustules, smallpox lesions, on the fingers of the hand holding the ticket. Oh shit. He will carry this disease with him on his way home, infecting passengers for hundreds of miles. The vision of a hand covered with active smallpox grasping a train ticket did something to me that seeing piles of dead bodies had not. This city must be quarantined. No one must be allowed to leave Tatanagar without a vaccination. I felt in over my head as I watched Zafar talk with the wailing mother.

I was just a young kid from Detroit, still in my twenties, on my first real job out of medical school. My wife and I had come to India two years earlier as hippies and spiritual seekers with Wavy Gravy on the Hog Farm commune buses with forty of our communal friends. Like many young people of our generation we drove along the Silk Route, now the Hippie Trail, from London through Turkey and Afghanistan over the Khyber Pass to Pakistan and then to Nepal.

After trekking in the Himalayas, my wife and I lived for a year in the ashram of our guru Neem Karoli Baba. We called him Maharaji. Nestled in the Himalayan foothills, in the spot on the map where India, Nepal, Tibet, and China come together, Maharaji’s ashram was part of the Kumaon Hills, a land filled with thousand-year-old temples and ashrams, yogis and babas, saints and mystics—genuine fakirs, as well as a few fakers. The Kainchi ashram gets its name from the Hindi word for “scissors,” a clever physical description of the meandering Kainchi River and spiritually apt: the river cuts off the everyday world from a decidedly mystical realm.

Even casual visitors who had no spiritual connection to Kainchi remarked that it felt otherworldly and as rock solid as the stone outcroppings of the Himalayan foothills from which it seemed to emerge. But beyond the complex of temple buildings there was something special in the air, a sparkling effervescence that tingled up your spine when you came around the bend to see the panorama of the temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god, or when you walked across the brightly colored bridge that separated the heavily trafficked road from the peace and quiet of the monastery.

I could have stayed forever with Maharaji, my wife, and our new friends—the “Das brothers” as we called those who had followed Ram Dass on this Himalayan pilgrimage: Ravi Das (now Judge Michael Jeffery), Kabir Das, Balaram Das, Dwarkanath Das, Krishna Das, and Jugganath Das (Dan Goleman) and Gita, Sita, Mira, and Sunanda—all Westerners with new Indian names, many of whom had arrived before me on their spiritual search. From our base in the ashram, Maharaji sent us on pilgrimages throughout India to meet holy men and women, to learn yoga and meditation.

But one day, Maharaji pulled me aside and, giggling, told me, “You have other things to do, Doctor America.” That was what he called me then. I wanted a spiritual name like one of the Das brothers, but he called me Doctor America. “You will go to villages giving vaccinations.” I thought he was telling me I was a failure as a meditator and seeker. And I had almost forgotten I was ever a doctor. Maharaji insisted. “With the help of dedicated health workers,” he said, “God will eradicate a terrible disease, smallpox. And Doctor America will become a United Nations doctor.”

When I became a UN doctor I was twenty years younger than most of my colleagues. The huge number of dead and dying, the vast amount of suffering in Tatanagar from an epidemic raging out of control, was overwhelming. I was adrift and far away from the help of colleagues in Delhi. There were no mobile phones, no faxes, and telegraph service was poor. It could take hours or days to arrange one call to headquarters.

And in that instant when I passed that nearly weightless dead child to Zafar, I felt the full weight of failure. My body shook. I wasn’t the best person to be at Tatanagar, and I certainly should not have been the only UN doctor here in this Dante’s Inferno, but I was here and now was the only moment that mattered. I felt on my own with nothing but faith to guide me.

Faith in what? God? Faith that what Maharaji had told me would come true? Faith in the science of epidemiology? Arriving in Tatanagar and seeing the piles of dead bodies—men, women, and children, the latest victims of Variola major, the newest offerings to Shitala Ma—made me realize how much I had underestimated the enormity of the work that my inscrutable guru had sent me out to do."

~ Larry Brilliant, Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History