When Ehler Eiskamp began practicing medicine in Watsonville, Calif., in 1925, doctors charged $2 for a house call. There were only eight drugs worth prescribing. And people fashioned their front doors into makeshift stretchers to transport emergency patients. Eiskamp, "the father of Watsonville's first modern hospital," guided the town through six decades of medical advances, including the introduction of penicillin, bypass surgery and the ambulance.
The first resident in obstetrics and surgery at Stanford Hospital and the first professionally trained surgeon to work in the Monterey Bay area, Eiskamp died December 30, at 102, of congestive heart failure.
Born in Washington, Iowa, Eiskamp moved to California because Stanford, then tuition-free, was one of the few universities his family could afford. In medical school, he chose surgery as his specialty because he thought it was the most effective type of doctoring. In the 1920s, "there was so little you could do in medicine," he told Stanford Medicine in 1998. "But with surgery, the results were fairly dramatic. Say you set a leg or took out an appendix or gallstones. Then, you were really doing something."
Eiskamp chose to work in agricultural Watsonville because he liked the people there and the challenge of practicing medicine in a rural area. He performed major surgeries and delivered hundreds of babies, many of whom he outlived. "His impact here was great," says town historian Betty Lewis. "He treated so many people, brought so many people into the world."
For his patients, Eiskamp went the extra mile -- or 74. He once hopped into an ambulance to watch over a heart patient during the journey from Watsonville to a San Francisco operating room. He treated many patients who could not pay, and some never forgot it. Once, he helped a woman who had lost five pregnancies give birth to a healthy baby. Twenty years later, that baby, all grown up, stopped by his office and insisted on paying for her own delivery. In 1983, the California Medical Association named Eiskamp the Rural Physician of the Year.
Eiskamp retired from surgery in 1970 but, at the insistence of his patients, continued to practice general medicine until 1985. Even after his 100th birthday, he continued to study surgical journals and doctor his 35 head of Hereford cattle, removing tumors and, of course, delivering calves.
Eiskamp's wife of 68 years, Agnes, died in 1995. Eiskamp is survived by his son, John, '60, MS '62; three grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and his sister, Marguerite Blaisdell, '20, MA '21.
