Century of Adventure in Northern Health
The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in Alaska, 1879-1978
University of Alaska Press, PHS Commissioned Officers Foundation
Published by the PHS Commissioned Officers Foundation for the Advancement of Public Health
The U.S. Public Health Service has a long and proud tradition in Alaska. In a vast territory with treacherous weather and logistical challenges, the officers and employees of the PHS have served on many fronts with skill, courage, and distinction. Dr. Robert Fortuine, who served in the PHS for twenty-six years, tells the story of these dedicated men and women in A Century of Adventure in Northern Health. It describes the isolation and physical hardships they endured as they fought epidemic disease and struggled to ensure that all Alaskans received the health care they so desperately needed.Robert Fortuine was a physician who spent 22 years in Alaska, most of them as either a clinician or a hospital director with the Indian Health Service. In 1989, he joined the faculty of the Biomedical Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he taught clinical medicine to the first-year medical students in the Washington/Alaska/Montana/Idaho (WAMI) program affiliated with the University of Washington Medical School. He wrote extensively on the history of medicine in Alaska and the arctic regions. The Alaska Historical Society named him Alaska Historian of the Year in 1990 in recognition of his book Chills and Fever.
