Page 29 - Delaware Medical Journal - March 2017

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
A Brief Remembrance of BZP
James F. Lally, MD Dr. Daniel DePietropaolo’s
wonderful tribute in the January
2017 issue of the Delaware Medical Journal celebrating the life and career of Bernadine Z. Paulshock, MD, brings back memories for some of us who did not know her as well as he did.
I initially knew her only casually from brief hallway hellos and local medical meetings. I got to know her better when she was the Editor of the Delaware Medical Journal (1981-1988) and in subsequent years.
An editorial that I wrote commenting
on President Clinton’s health reform bill appeared in the Delaware Medical Journal in March 1995: “The Failure of Health Care Reform and the Gunning Fog Index.” She sent me a note (signed BZP, as all of her correspondences were) saying that
she liked it, particularly the title. I think
it appealed to her keen sense of what is different and out of the mainstream.
A year earlier, just by chance, I read an account she had written in the September
21, 1994 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Until
the Peppers.” The intriguing title led me further into the article. In the late 1970s Dr. Paulshock worked part time (pro bono) in a migrant farmers’ medical clinic in southern Delaware. The piece showed that she had a novelist’s eye for a good story while driving a socially important issue. It was a plea to give migrant agriculture workers access to better health care. This paragraph is illustrative: “Back then migrant farmworkers were often imported just for the season. Many were Spanish, but there were a few from French (Creole)-speaking Haiti. Most patients were young children with runny noses or abraded knees and no record
of immunizations. The lollipop we gave them at the end of their visits may have been the real reason they came to the clinic.” Paulshock frets that she has limited resources to treat a woman with hypertension who was aging beyond her years. She tries to arrange a follow-up visit and asks, “How long will you be here?” The woman replies, “Jusqu’à les poivrons — until the peppers.”
I wrote to her, and an exchange of several letters followed. I told her that her article was a memorable sequel
to a 1960 CBS report (it’s available
on YouTube): “Harvest of Shame.”
In graphic detail that documentary showed the plight of migrant workers who followed the harvests from Florida to New Jersey. The narrator was the legendary CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow. Murrow thought of the migrants’ predicament as a 1960s “Grapes of Wrath.” In his introduction Murrow said: “They are the migrants, workers in the sweat shops of the soil — the harvest of shame.”
BZP, with her towering intellect, cast
a wide net in the Delaware medical community that touched many; she will be greatly missed.
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
■ JAMES F. LALLY, MD is a retired Radiologist and a member of the Medical Society of Delaware Editorial Board.
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