THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410060209
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
IN 1934, A YOUNG DOCTOR from Norfolk arrived to begin his internship at Logan General Hospital, a stark five story building perched precariously on the side of a West Virginia hillside.
In August, Dr. Israel Maurice Kruger returned to West Virginia from his Virginia Beach home for a very special honor. The Logan Medical Foundation was dedicating a new medical plaza on the hospital grounds to the city boy who came to coal country more than half a century ago and stayed.
In the intervening years, Kruger has delivered the babies (nearly 5,000 of them), set the bones, treated the lungs, diagnosed the illnesses and shared both the good times and the bad of the mountain folks who were his patients from the time he began to practice medicine until his retirement in 1980.
His arrival at Logan, a town of 5,500 in the coal mining country south of Charleston, was almost an accident.
``I was supposed to go to Huntington,'' the Maury High School and University of Virginia graduate said, ``but the same people who owned the hospital there owned the one in Logan and they sent me to Logan instead.''
What he found in that small mountain town was primitive even by 1934 standards. ``I used to dream of a hospital like they had in Charlottesville,'' Kruger said.
Slowly the hardware of modern medicine arrived. Seven thousand dollars worth of up-to-date X-ray equipment delivered in 1936 made radiography safer and more precise. A new operating room with thermostatically controlled steam and electric heat began providing more comfort for both patients and staff that same year.
Typhoid and diphtheria were the killers during Kruger's early years of practice. Polio was the crippler for many more.
Kruger still remembers driving through one small city during a large polio outbreak. ``There wasn't anyone on the streets at all. They were afraid even to come out of their homes,'' he said.
He saw polio and many more diseases reduced or eliminated during his years in Logan and during the four years he spent as a Navy doctor during World War II.
He also saw giant leaps in the use of medications. Aspirin was the pain killer of choice in his early days, wounds were treated with little more than antiseptic solutions.
``I saw penicillin introduced at Bethesda (Naval Hospital),'' he said. It was the first of many miracle drugs which would be available when he returned to civilian practice.
Like most hospitals, the one in Logan grew both in size and sophistication in the years following World War II. Kruger's part in that growth, along with his dedication to the patients he served, played a significant part in the decision to dedicate the new medical plaza in his name.
At his side through most of those changes was a young University of Virginia-trained nurse named Billie Kinzer, who had come home to nearby Ethel to be near her mother after her father died shortly after the war.
A group picture of the Logan County Medical Auxiliary taken in 1948 shows the newlywed Billie Kinzer Kruger, hands demurely clasped in front of her, a broad smile on her pretty face.
The Krugers are the parents of two children, daughter Sarah Leigh Keasey, who is a recovery room nurse at Virginia Beach General; and son Michael, an orthopedic surgeon in Connecticut. There are also three grandchildren.
Michael has two sons and Sarah has a daughter whose frequent visits to the Kruger's Haygood townhouse delight both grandparents, especially her grandfather, who never got over the thrill of seeing new life.
``I love delivering babies,'' Kruger said, ``seeing that baby take its first breath, seeing the look on the mother's face when I first held the baby up for her to see.''
For others going into medicine, the dignified, soft-spoken Kruger offers some basic advice.
``Practice as ethically as you possibly can and never stop learning,'' he said. They were the canons by which he lived, the ones that won him the devotion of the small town patients and doctors who chose to dedicate their new pavilion to him 14 years after he last practiced medicine in Logan, W.Va. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by JO-ANN CLEGG
Fourteen years after they last practiced there, Dr. Israel Maurice
Kruger and his wife Billie, a nurse, returned to Logan, W.Va., where
a hospital medical plaza was dedicated in his honor.
by CNB