Santo Domingo's cure.

• Author: Steif, William
• Position: Dominican Republic - Brief Article

THOUSANDS OF CRIPPLED Caribbean children should soon be leading normal lives, thanks to an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. C. Scott Harrison.

He's buying two floors of a structure now being built in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, about a block from the U.S. Embassy. The two floors will become the first Western Hemisphere hospital of CURE International, which Harrison started in 1996 under the name Crippled Children's United Rehabilitation Effort.

CURE surgeons diagnose orthopedic problems of children up to age eighteen and then perform the surgery permitting these children to live normally. Harrison says the Santo Domingo hospital will serve as "a regional center" for crippled children from all over the Caribbean.

In the Third World, he says, children who are born club-footed, for instance, simply remain so. Children born with spinal deformities usually aren't treated, nor are polio victims' deformities. Children born with hydrocephalus--water on the brain--go untreated and often die by age five.

Harrison, sixty-four, built CURE's first thirty-bed hospital in Kenya in 1997. Next came a forty-six-bed hospital in Uganda, and this summer CURE is opening a sixty-six-bed hospital at Blantyre, Malawi.

The new CURE hospital in Santo Domingo will be in a seven-story structure identical to one already serving as a Dominican medical center. The new building will be finished by year's end.

The CURE Dominican hospital will be run by at least one U.S. or English expatriate doctor, with five Dominican physicians and a staff of eighty to ninety nurses and other aides. Local doctors will receive additional training, and clinics will be held around the country to diagnose problems.

No emergency cases will be taken, but corrective surgery for burn victims will be possible.

The rule, says Harrison, is to take...