David Stoltze M.D.
Finca "El Almendrillo" Iznájar, Andalucia
For two years I have worked alongside physician friend David Stoltze, editing his memoirs - or "vignettes" as we call them.
David's autobiography begins with his California boyhood, raised by German grandparents so that when he started speaking English (his second language), he spoke with a German accent.
Following his reminiscences of childhood and high school, David reaches full stride as a late sixties psychedelic wunderkind at Cal Berkeley; followed by Medical School at the University of San Diego (where he participated in what may be the weirdest amputation in human history), followed by his harrowing internship at Chicago's Cook County Hospital.
David then recounts his experience as a young socialist in Zimbabwe and soon thereafter his role founding the first public health clinic on the "floor" of the Barranca del Cobre, homeland of the Tarahumara people.
"Estolzeh" continued writing his late 80s' memoirs which detail our time together at the Managua Medical School, followed by reflections on a year-long medical mission "down under,'' mostly in Australia's "jackaroo-aboriginal" outback.
With Nazis and anti-fascist resistance fighters in his family line, David - in the early 2000's - saw the United States drifting toward fascist takeover and left his medical clinic in New Mexico ("the only socialist clinic in America"), moving to the Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, British Columbia, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle, where just last week the temperature in Lytton, B.C. reached 121 (one hundred twenty one) degrees Fahrenheit - one day before the small city burned to the ground. https://apnews.com/
This afternoon, David and I spent three hours pouring over his most recent vignette probing the discovery of 215 small bodies at the Kamloops Indian Residential School operated by The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
"The F Word": Dr. David Stoltze's Acceptance Speech For "Family Physician of the Year" Award, 2004
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