Frank Artress

Abstract

At what was surely the largest ever Lunch with The Lancet, 17 of us sat down in Arusha, Tanzania, with Frank Artress. Artress is no stranger to Africa. He was born in Ethiopia, where his father was a missionary doctor. But he was raised in California, where he finished medical school and trained as a cardiac anaesthesiologist. He returned to Africa after a life-changing, nearly life-ending, experience. About 6 years ago, on a trip to Tanzania “My wife Susan and I fell in love with the country and the people. We decided to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for my 50th and Susan's 40th birthday. It was a wonderful, uneventful climb for the first 5 days, until we stopped for lunch at 18 000 feet, and I went into full-blown high-altitude pulmonary oedema. I realised there was less than a 25% chance that I would make it off the mountain alive. Sitting up there, facing those odds, was a pretty powerful spiritual experience. Suddenly my ‘previous life’ seemed rather shallow and self-serving, and the thought of dying then without having had the opportunity to give more back to society was a bit overwhelming”. 36 hours later, with the heroic efforts of guides and porters, they made it down the mountain. Artress was treated by a doctor who said that he would recover, but “they sure needed doctors in Tanzania a whole lot more than they needed doctors in California. We thought about this for 24 hours, and both decided that it was the right time to make a change and do something different with our lives. We flew home, quit our jobs, sold or gave away most everything we had, and formed the non-profit Foundation for African Medicine and Education (FAME); and moved to Tanzania.” To combat a “mind-bogglingly steep learning curve”, Artress partnered with three local doctors. Tanzania has only one doctor for every 25 000 patients, and medical education—to say nothing of postgraduate training or continuing medical education—is prohibitively expensive (about US$6000 per year). “The heartbreak of medicine in Africa”, he says, is a shortage of equipment and plenty of preventable diseases. FAME's goal is to construct several facilities, including a clinic and a hospital, in a phased project that will have education as its backbone. “We realise that one doctor, treating one patient at a time, is only a drop in the bucket in view of the massive needs here.” Still, Artress says, his work in Tanzania “is tremendously rewarding, and can be lots of fun—all you need is a spirit of adventure, flexibility, and patience. Not ‘patients’, though—we've got lots of those!”