Delivery Man
The hours are long, maddenly unpredictable; the clients - or roughly half of them - noisy, uncooperative, and thoroughly disrespectful of the comfort and convenience of their elders.
But "through it all there is always the sense of miracle and wonder. It is absolutely stupefying that the complex elements of pursuit, love-making, gestation, labor, and delivery can ultimately produce something as incredibly perfect as a baby, insistently bent upon thriving and growing to maturity."
In these words, from his book with the inspired title Pregnancy: The Best State of the Union, WALDO L. FIELDING '43 proclaims the real compensation of the practice of obstetrics.
The Alumni Directory lists Dr. Fielding as " '43 M.D. '43." The apparent anomaly arises from the wartime dislocation of the college timetable; under that early version of year-round operation, undergraduate work could be completed in three years, which permitted him to satisfy medical requirements by Christmas of the year his class would normally have graduated. But the coincidence would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with "Doc" Fielding's propensity for simultaneous enterprise.
In college, even on the accelerated schedule, he starred in Players and Experimental Theater productions. When illness delayed his transfer to the University of Michigan medical school, he convalesced in Hanover by putting on shows for the Navy trainees. He played professional nightclub engagements in New York and appeared regularly on CBS's Mississippi Music Hall during residencies at Bellevue, Harlem Hospital, and the Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City, which followed service as a Navy medical officer in the Pacific theater.
The pattern continues, although what Dr. Fielding calls "the terrible dichotomy" between the worlds of the entertainer and the physician was satisfactorily resolved in favor of the latter. He currently manages a busy private practice; teaching appointments at Harvard, Tufts, and Boston University; a demanding schedule of lecturing and writing; and the volunteer directorship of Preterm, a non-profit, low-cost abortion clinic with a professional staff of 50, the only one registered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Meanwhile, back at the mike, he accommodates the alternate horn of his early dilemma by occasional appearances as raconteur extraordinaire at such special events as medical society dinners and Dartmouth reunions.
Although he disavows the title of "obstetrical Dr. Spock" ( Wouldn't that be nice!"), Pregnancy: The Best State of theUnion has earned plaudits from mothers and colleagues alike - and the dissenting epithet "snake-in-the-grass" from Ms magazine. Written in a style both light and thoughtful, witty but uncondescending, informative yet eminently readable, the book deals candidly with possible problems, takes broad swipes at faddists, and scatters in its wake a stream of old - and young - Mives' tales. Now in a second edition, it joins his Case AgainstNatural Childbirth, The Childbirth Challenge (of which he was co-auther), and a long list of articles in medical journals in the Fielding bibliography.
Germinating in Dr. Fielding's mind are ideas for two more books, dealing with opposite ends of the reproductive cycle. One, evolving from question-and-answer sessions at local schools, is on puberty, a subject he finds so vast as to defy focus. The other, on the menopause, emerged from an appearance on a network talk show. I he 800 letters from viewers, all answered personally, demonstrated for him the need of a non-technical book on a phenomenon a longer lifespan has made "fundamentally a new entity; until the 19th century, it really didn't exist."
All his projects and plans notwithstanding, Dr. Fielding claims to be slowing down. He's in the office only three days a week now; Wednesdays he spends at the clinic and Fridays he takes off after morning surgery - unless a baby wills otherwise. He gets away when he can to Cape Cod, where he swims in season and hones a tennis game he substituted a few years ago for a six-stroke golf handicap. Mrs. Fielding, a rising young singer in New York when they met and more recently, as Sue Bennett, a Boston TV personality with her own show, has trimmed her career to match and now confines her professional activities largely to commercials.
Dr. Fielding sees obstetrics and gynecology as a specialty on the wane, as birth rates drop and medical students, motivated less by money than by self-interest, lean toward more orderly fields which will allow them more time for their personal lives.
For him, however, the satisfaction of a specialty timelessly associated with joyous events and joyful people is, if anything, intensified by the increasingly voluntary nature of pregnancy. With improved contraceptive techniques and more readily available abortion, he finds his obstetrical patients, almost always, "radiantly pregnant; they're having babies because they want them."
Retirement has no part in. "Doc" Fielding's plans. Long and unpredictable hours? "I love the regularity of the irregularity." And then there is still that "sense of miracle and wonder."
Jed Fielding
