Will Butler, M. D. is a semi-retired physician who has lived and practiced medicine in Hawaii for the past 53 years.
At the age of nineteen he had two degrees in literature, one from Duke University and another from Stanford, where he taught briefly. He lived in Guadalajara for five years, most of the time as Principal of the American School of Mexico. After a year in the service during World War II he returned to his first love and took a degree in medicine from Tulane University in New Orleans. His fourth child was born during his Freshman year.
He spent seven years in the private solo practice of medicine on Molokai, the smallest of the inhabited Hawaiian Islands. Then he moved with his family to Honolulu, where with a few friends he founded the Hawaii Region of the Kaiser Health Plan, today one of the largest Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), with over 8.5 million members nationwide.
During his entire professional life, indeed as early as his ‘teen years, Dr. Butler has been a non-conformist and skeptic. His book recounts in depth some of the bruising political and social battles entailed thereby, including that waged by the Kaiser group against the local medical establishment, which was determined to squash competition from the “upstart” newcomers.
Footloose lovers in Mexico, by 1965 Barb and Will found themselves in the thick of battle in the early civil rights movement in Alabama. There is an interesting retrospective about Will’s father, a prominent forensic pathologist who risked everything pioneering in the humane medical treatment of drug addicts and another about the life of an American doctor in the Mexican Revolution, told by his widow. Clearly, then, there is much here to fascinate medicine buffs, concerned citizens, mavericks and social critics of today’s world.
However, the heart and soul of this book are in the love between these two, from their meeting on a tennis court. Seasoned with a large dollop of humor and satire, the tale reached its apogee of intensity—and anguish—in her seventeen year, ultimately losing battle against throat cancer, during which Will was both her sole care-giver and her attending physician. Barb died in October of 2003.
