Hayfield’s Doctor Harold Elliot was a local hero

Published 12:00 am Monday, September 27, 1999

I thought of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), that famous Alsatian missionary-physician, who spent his life and exhausted his career in the healing of the poor in Africa.

Monday, September 27, 1999

I thought of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), that famous Alsatian missionary-physician, who spent his life and exhausted his career in the healing of the poor in Africa. I thought of Dr. Schweitzer while listening to a less well known – but equally selfless and fully dedicated physician – tell me his life story, including his years in Africa.

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This, however, is one whom our area can rightfully claim as a local hero. He died on Sept. 2, and a memorial service was held in Hayfield on Saturday with his brother officiating.

While I had previously met him on Austin visits, I got to know Harold Elliot, M.D., during our conversation less than two years ago in South Carolina. He was then in the final days before retirement, at age 84, as a practicing physician.

He wasn’t then able to travel over the five sea islands as he had for eight years caring for the poor and otherwise physicianless people. He had a few rooms at the end of a Methodist church’s education building on John’s Island and practiced solo for 20 years. Working under the name of Poebe Taylor Memorial Family Practice Clinic, he was still healing as best he could whoever could get to him. As before, however, they were poor and neglected except for this humble doctor who had never neglected anyone.

Now mind you, the great admiration I am expressing for this physician, this almost hero-worship, does not reflect negatively on others who practice differently. I know the rest of us also need medical care, and I recognize no necessary dishonor in physicians receiving substantial incomes. (When averaged out by the hours spent in training and practice, there emerges a rate no labor union would tolerate.)

It may well be that Dr. Elliot’s self-giving came naturally from his parents who were Evangelical Church missionaries to Sierre Lione, where he was born in 1914.

Upon his 1940 completion of medical internship in New York, young Doctor Elliot went to Kentucky to minister medically and spiritually for six years in the Red Bird Mission, also under the sponsorship of the Evangelical Church.

It is there that the Minnesota connection was made, for he found a missionary nurse from Austin by the name of Bernita Coddington. They returned to Hayfield for their wedding.

As soon as trans-Atlantic sailing again became possible after World War II, the doctor and his nurse went to northern Nigeria and served with the Sudan United Mission.

They continued there until 1953 when they returned to her native Hayfield where he again had a rural practice until 1969. Even then, he took a two-year leave again to practice "missionary medicine" in Africa, the Congo this time.

After his wife died, he went south again and this time farther, to South Carolina where he was director of Rural Missions Health Center until 1972. He spent the next five years with the Sea Islands Comprehensive Health Center as its medical director and senior physician.

I again came into contact with Dr. Elliot while doing research in the sea islands by making contact with descendants of slaves my great, great grandfather had freed in 1838. He, too, was a physician and minister, and many today proudly bear his name in their freedom. Grandfather had to flee North in order to continue to practice and minister. Dr. Elliot chose to go to the same people for the same reason.

What most impresses me about Harold Elliot is how little he expected in return for his professional work but how much reward he experienced in it.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays