FOND REMEMBRANCE: STRONG HANDS OF A GENTLE PHYSICIAN

We hear lots of discussion and argument concerning international trade. Voices are loud, some even angry, advocating protectionism, free trade, or some admixture of the two. I'll give you an argument for free trade between nations.

One of the finest men who ever lived in Cape Girardeau was a native Canadian, a physician who migrated south for advanced training in St. Louis, before settling here and living most of his adult life, practicing orthopaedic surgery and raising his large family. Despite eminent professional attainments, pathbreaking expertise and leadership as a dedicated caregiver, he lived a life of such quiet and unassuming modesty that many long-time residents did not know him.

I am proud to say I knew him.

I shall miss Dr. Tom Otto, who Thursday morning lost his lengthy battle with cancer. We run the risk of cheapening superlatives by their overuse; still, here was truly a great man. As the moving tribute we published in Friday's edition attests, I am far from alone in this assessment.

Six months or so ago, I stood in a supermarket line. Surveying the bustling crowd that surrounded me, I spied Dr. Tom across the way, in the company, as usual, of his lovely wife Dorothy. I felt simultaneous twinges of sympathy, remorse and regret. I should have set aside my purchases, gone up to my ailing former doctor, and greeted him. I didn't.

Had I done so, I would have recalled visits to his office for diagnosis and treatment. Though more than 20 years have passed, it seems like yesterday. Dr. Otto's office was on Broadway (this was before Doctor's Park).

I was a brash, 14- and 15-year-old fullback with a habit of banging my knee on opposing helmets and body parts with sufficient force to cause a condition commonly known as "water on the knee". It seems the blows I sustained were sufficiently sharp to bruise small envelopes called bursa (which help lubricate the knee joint) to burst. The sinovial fluid thus loosed would fill the knee joint, causing bursitis, with its characteristic pain and swelling. Sustain such blows once or twice, Dr. Tom explained, and you're likely to suffer them as a recurrent malady during contact sports.

The most vivid memory of a visit to Dr. Otto's office was of his hands. There was his native gentleness, his kindly good humor, his genuine interest in the individual patient. But most of all, it was the hands: They were massive hands, strong hands, gentle hands, good hands.

I shall always remember Dr. Tom's skilled hands gripping my swollen knee, as he drained my excess sinovial fluid into a huge hypodermic needle he had inserted for that purpose. Here was a doctor, a healer, a skilled physician at his best. Here, indeed, was a great man, a kindly man, a good man.

Quintillian, the ancient Roman scholar of the art of rhetoric, once posed his ideal of the excellent public speaker: "The good man, speaking well."

As a man of action through the art and science of healing, it's a compliment to say of Dr. Tom that he was no man of words. Still, something like Quintillian's ideal orator was at work with Dr. Tom Otto:

The good doctor, taking time, doing well for his patients, alleviating suffering, improving their lives. One is reminded of the aphorism that says, "Action is eloquence." Although he made a fine living for his family, and in recent years there was time for some travel, I am sure he never became a man of much wealth. He was of the old school of physicians: Service to fellow man not the accumulation of things was his goal.

Lay not up for yourself riches in this world, for my kingdom is not of this world.

Dr. Tom Otto was a gentleman, a scholar and a loving family man. If you did not have the privilege of knowing Dr. Tom, I hope you have known other physicians, cut, perhaps, from a similar bolt of cloth.

In short order, back in his simple office on Broadway, Dr. Tom would finish draining my knee, and I would get a wrap bandage, and I would be on my way, much the better for my 15 or 20 minutes in his care.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, I wonder: Can any conventional yardstick measure the skill, the dedication, the love in those hands?

Death has now stilled them. But they will never be forgotten.