by FIDES LIM

FRAIL BUT feisty still at 95, the diminutive doctora is proof positive of her own prescription for longevity: “Leave the dining table a little less full, a little hungry, and you will live longer.”

	NOW 95 years old, Dr. Fe del Mundo remains the doyenne of Filipino doctors, whose many accomplishments have changed the lives of millions of people. [photo by Fides Lim]

The black bouffant wig nods on her tiny, spare frame as she ticks off a simple diet mostly of fish and vegetables with little rice, plus a fondness for cheese. Yet there is more to this admittedly “lazy eater” who eats, she says, “because it’s there.” 

Fe del Mundo, doyenne of Filipino doctors, is a woman of many firsts, whose many accomplishments have changed the lives of millions of people.

Married only to her profession, she however counts a multiple brood from generations down that she has variously embraced and they, her. They include not only those who were entrusted in her direct care, but also those whose lives she has touched and strengthened through rural rehydration and health centers, immunization campaigns against polio, measles and chickenpox, anti-tuberculosis programs, and a diarrhea treatment called BRAT (banana, rice, apple, tea) that has benefited and saved millions of children around the world.

There are also the hundreds of students who came under her tutelage — from the nursing school she set up at North General Hospital after the war, to her long teaching stint at the University of Santo Tomas (1943-1974) and chairing the pediatrics department at Far Eastern University (1956-1976), to the training centers and health institutes that she shepherded.

Then there are the 400 youngsters who became her special wards during the Japanese Occupation. The offspring of U.S., British, and other foreign nationals who were imprisoned upon the outbreak of the war, del Mundo with the help of the Red Cross set up a “Children’s Home” to care for these sick children in enemy-occupied Manila.

“I’m glad that I have been very much involved in the care of children, and that I have been relevant to them,” says del Mundo, in tones so soft one has to strain to hear her. “They are the most outstanding feature in my life.”

IT HAS been a life marked by both tragedy and triumph. The sixth of eight children of Paz Villanueva and Bernardo del Mundo, a prominent lawyer from Marinduque, the death in childhood of four of her siblings influenced her decision to take up medicine.

It was particularly the memory of youngest sister Elisa who died at seven years old from peritonitis, an abdominal infection, that firmed up her resolve to become a doctor. “She kept a little notebook where she wrote that she wanted to take up medicine,” recalls del Mundo. “When she died, I decided to take her place.”

	THE hospital she founded and which bears her name unfortunately had to temporarily close down this week, hit by a strike. [photo by Fides Lim]

In 1933, 22-year-old Fe graduated valedictorian from the University of the Philippines’ medical school. Financial problems nearly prevented her from finishing but a relative came to her rescue. In school, she observed that those who had textbooks hardly read them, while those who were hard-up like her would borrow and study the books whenever possible. But she says, “Monetary aspects have not been important considerations in my choice of direction or targets.”

The extremely shy girl who was known to cry when asked to speak before the class chose pediatrics as her field of specialization. Barely five feet and weighing less than a hundred pounds, she had often been advised by her medical professors that this was the best option as the patients would be smaller than she is.

But it was her research work as an intern in her home province of Marinduque that sealed her decision. “I saw how many children were not receiving medical attention and how many were dying,” she recounts. “There was no doctor for children and the provincial health officer had no background at all about pediatrics.” She was dismayed when the health officer always gave the same diagnosis and advice for every sick child: “Oh, that’s worms. Give him a purgative!”

Those experiences sparked a serious interest that would develop into a lifelong commitment in the identification and treatment of childhood diseases and its prevention. She was to pioneer in this expanded role of pediatrics — from the prenatal care of mothers to the health and development of children through adolescence. And her grassroots immersion in Marinduque would lead her to further reach out to poor children in other doctorless remote areas.

She had to be creative in the struggle to save lives in a country where babies die from the most common yet preventable diseases. She is credited with devising an incubator for use in rural areas without electricity, as well as a cloth-suspended scale to weigh infants and a radiant warmer made of bamboo to regulate the body temperature of newborns with special care needs.

The makeshift incubator consisted of two native laundry baskets of different sizes placed one inside the other. “I put in hot water bottles all around between them. I put a little hood over it and attached oxygen for the baby,” she says. “We had to do with whatever was available.”

Driven by a thirst for knowledge and to expand her horizons, del Mundo sought and worked hard to obtain a study grant to the United States. In 1936, through an unexpected scholarship offer under President Manuel Quezon, she was accepted at Harvard University Medical School for postgraduate work.

She recalls with a chortle that when she went to the dormitory assigned her in Boston, she found herself in a men’s dorm. Unknowingly, Harvard — which would open its doors to women only in 1949 — had admitted a female to be part of its all-male student body. But because of her scholastic credentials, the pediatrics head saw no reason to send her back. Thus, she became the first Filipino woman and the only female at the time to be enrolled at the Harvard Medical School.