丹麦医生过世，享年114岁

下午又在NPR里听到 Dr. Danmark 去世的消息，心被触动了一下。又有不少事必须做。刚坐下来，看到关于她的文章已满山遍野了。拉了一篇。请股沟效劳，惨不忍睹。自己翻一下子又没时间，大家将就一下吧。广播里说她诊费只收10元。有人一家五代都被他诊治。。。。。。不得不迷信一下：好人善报啊！

Hundreds of people came to Athens First United Methodist Church on Thursday to pay their last respects to Dr. Leila Denmark, who had ministered to almost all of them in one way or another.

Denmark, who died in Athens on Sunday at the age of 114, was a pediatrician who practiced in Atlanta for more than 70 years, and many of those who nearly filled the church’s sanctuary were former patients of the woman they called Dr. Leila. Many others were younger friends or members of Denmark’s large extended family. Denmark had one child of her own and two grandchildren, but dozens of nieces, nephews and their children.

“My mother never talked about her faith, but she practiced it,” said daughter Mary Hutcherson, one of the speakers during Thursday’s funeral services for Denmark. “She was out there to help people, whether they were poor, family or whatever. All she wanted was to see that children got the chances they needed to get.”

“She was really a true role model for all of us,” a servant leader who led by example, said grandson Stephen Hutcherson.

Denmark’s life spanned the entire 20th Century and parts of the century before and after; she was five years old when the Wright brothers’ first airplane flew, noted her other grandson, James Hutcherson, a physician like his grandmother.

Denmark was respected in her profession as a practitioner, and in the 1930s, she was an important part of the team that developed a vaccine for whooping cough, which killed many children then. In 1971, she also wrote a child-rearing book that’s still in print: “Every Child Should Have a Chance.”

But most of those who came to First United Methodist Church had personal stories they shared during a reception following Thursday’s funeral service.

Kay Weathers recalled her fear in 1978 when her months-old first child seemed ill, crying incessantly, while she and husband Steve were on vacation on Panama City, Fla. Nothing they or their regular pediatrician in Nashville, Tenn., did seemed to work, and a friend suggested calling Dr. Leila up in Atlanta.

Dr. Leila had never met or heard of Kay Weathers, but talked to the young mother for more than an hour, Weathers recalled. She concluded that young John was hungry. The doctor also instructed Weathers in how to feed him — starting off with a quarter-teaspoon at first of rice cereal or mashed bananas, to make sure he wasn’t allergic, and so on.

“She could tell we didn’t know what to do,” Kay Weathers said.

John started improving right away.

“He was just our boy again,” Kay Weathers said. “She was just great.”

The Weathers family later moved to Atlanta and all five of their sons eventually became Dr. Leila’s patients.

For the first few years, Denmark never charged the Weathers for their office visits; they worked in a church mission, and had little money.

“She would not let us pay,” Kay Weathers said.

Even those who did pay didn’t face big charges. Only near the end of her career in 2001 did Denmark raise her fee for a standard office visit from $8 to $10.

Denmark also gave free medical care to others who had little or no money, for more than 50 years working one day a week in a medical clinic in the Atlanta’s Central Presbyterian Church, Hutcherson said.

Some families brought children to Denmark for generations.

Paula Lewis, who attended Thursday’s service with daughter Gina Booth, was Denmark’s young patient in the 1960s; so was Booth a few years later, and so were the first eight of Gina’s 12 children.