Former Prairie du Sac doctor fell in love with Peru

Photo by John Maniaci / Capital Newspapers

Dr. Linnea Smith stands in the greenhouse attached to her Black Earth home. Her plants inspired her to take a vacation to the Peruvian jungle 18 years ago. That one visit was enough to make her quit her Wisconsin medical practice to serve as the only doctor in a remote rainforest region in Peru.

By Melanie Conklin, Capital Newspapers

Dr. Linnea Smith left her family medical practice in Prairie du Sac to take her doctoring deep in the Amazon rainforest in Peru, in a spot so remote that patients arrive in dugout canoes.

She blames this radical move on her house plants.

Before attending medical school at UW-Madison, she ran the Sunshine Store, an exotic plant shop in Cross Plains. So in 1990, after three years as a doctor, she ventured on vacation to the Peruvian rainforest to see where her plants came from.

After a week in the Yanamono rainforest, she did not want to leave.

"I tell people it's like falling in love," Smith mused. "You can point to a lot of reasons to be in Peru. There's need there but there's need in this country, too. But like falling in love, when you dig beneath the reasons, there's the chemistry. Peru had — and still has — that chemistry for me."

So Smith, a Milwaukee-area native, took a leave of absence from her practice to open a clinic in a room at an eco-tourism lodge.

She spoke no Spanish, practicing medicine with light from a kerosene lantern and the few supplies she brought: a stethoscope, a small microscope, a bottle of prenatal vitamins and a few doses of antibiotics.

"I've always been a little eccentric and I guess I live a little on the edge," Smith said. "And practicing medicine in the Amazon rainforest without electricity or running water is about as edgy as you can get."

Eighteen years later, she's still there — now with a clinic built by several Rotary Clubs, a tiny two-room house with a latrine out back and a practice that serves around 2,500 people a year.

Most patients are indigenous, although when needed she treats guests at the nearby Explorama Lodge, which in turn provides her food, land for her house and river transportation.

"Now I've been there long enough that I know my patients and I get to see the children of people who were children when I was first there," Smith said during an interview at her Black Earth home, decorated with watercolors she's painted of her jungle environs in Peru. "I've been a part of the community for a long time, so it's very much home and all my patients are my children."

La Doctora

Being the only clinic in the area, Smith treats maladies far outside her medical training. She has pulled teeth, learned tubal ligations and some ophthalmology and routinely treats snakebites, parasites, a multitude of infectious diseases along with emergency care.

Take the 10-year-old boy who was brought to her after he had been attacked by a large Caiman, a type of crocodile.

"He's walking home from soccer one afternoon as it got dark and he trips over what he thinks is a log, whereupon the log reaches up and grabs him," Smith said. "It takes a bite out of his thigh. ... The kid falls down and he bites him again."

The boy was brought to her with a gash in his shoulder blade and a punctured lung.

Asked how it turned out, Smith shrugged, "He did fine."

It's a characteristic response for Smith, who downplays challenges that others would find daunting in a seemingly detached matter.

But her brusqueness is a bit of a cover, according to one of Smith's close friends.

"Every person that comes into her clinic is important to her," said Pam Bucur, an American woman who helps run the Explorama Lodge in Peru and is one of Smith's closest friends. "She treats each person with the same easygoing manner, and it's only if you know her well that you can tell she's more concerned than she lets on."

Bucur recalled Smith arriving in a long denim skirt made of old jeans: "She preferred to be barefoot rather than wearing shoes, even in jungle. No one believed that she was a medical doctor. But behind the hippyish exterior, I have come to know one of the most brilliant people I have met in my life."

The local people clearly respect the woman they simply call "Doctora," without whom many would not have medical care.

Early on, she performed her first Caesarean section, a few years later repeating the procedure on the same woman. Both kids are now healthy teens and the girl is named "Lis Linnea."

"Linnea is definitely part of the community of the Yanamono area," said Peter Jenson, owner of the Explorama Lodge. "She is godmother to any number of children, goes to the fiestas of the (local) river people, travels with them in their dugout canoes to see patients too sick to come to her clinic and goes to meetings of the village counsels."

In 1998 she published a book on her experiences titled "La Doctora." In 2005, the Wisconsin Medical Society chose Smith as the Wisconsin Physician Citizen of the Year.

This fall, she received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association, which takes trips that visit her clinic in Peru.

Smith did something rare in surrendering her own creature comforts, but even more extraordinary is that she is not intimidated by practicing medicine with an "absence of resources" that would frighten many doctors, said Dr. Tim Bartholow, who has practiced with Smith in Prairie du Sac and is now a senior vice president of the Wisconsin Medical Society.

"She overcame that need to be comfortable as a physician," Bartholow said. "She's not a knight on a white horse to save them. She practices out of humility and has the honesty to say 'I can't get it all done.' She's able to just be there for another human being."

Splitting home

For a decade, Smith lived exclusively in the Amazon save for brief visits home. Now she divides her time equally between the places she calls home.

During the months Smith spends in Black Earth, she works in emergency rooms in Reedsburg and Platteville, obtains supplies for the clinic and is working on plans for a new clinic building as the river shifted and is now just 30 feet from its door.

Several years ago she encountered Jerry Goth, who bought a plant from her decades earlier that kindled his interest in native prairie restoration.

"She was a very big influence on me in a subtle way," said Goth, now her significant other.

He has visited Peru several times and was shocked by how she was able to practice medicine in a clinic on stilts with screens but no glass panes and remedial surgical instruments she sterilizes in a pressure cooker.

"She's a good ditch doctor," Goth said. "Her diagnosis is with experience. If you get malaria, she's who you want to see."

He laughed noting that when she walks through the villages, little kids shriek because she gives them vaccines, but he added that adults are appreciative because without her they'd have no doctor.

"She's a very unselfish person," he added. "She could be making huge amounts of money as an American doctor."

One issue for Smith, 59, is that she doesn't have much of a 401K or retirement plan.

In 1996, after Smith worked six years without pay, some Wisconsin friends founded the Amazon Medical Project in Mazomanie as a nonprofit so Smith could draw a small salary, now about $15,000 including benefits, as medical director.

The clinic budget also funds a small staff that includes local workers Smith trained. Once she retires, she plans to return to Wisconsin.

But she isn't ready to bid Peru farewell just yet.

"Leaving the Amazon for the last time would be really, really hard for me," Smith added. "Both places feel like home and there are things about both places that I miss when I'm not there."