The Book…

Answering Alaska's Call

Alaska's first eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist, arrived in 1940, intent on bringing modern medicine to the Alaska bush

This memoir-biography of Alaska’s legendary Doc Fritz, is a twentieth-century version of an age-old story—a hero's quest into the unknown.

Witty, passionate, out-spoken, and ever-curious, Milo H. Fritz is a complicated and charismatic individual. Following his three-year residency at Duke Medical School, the newly trained eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist wants to practice where he can do the most good. He decides to leave the familiar New York metropolitan area of his youth and seek challenge and adventure in the Territory of Alaska where, he has read, its Native populations are being ravaged by tuberculosis, terrible afflictions of the eyes and ears, as well as other ailments caused by poverty and neglect.

Providing desperately needed medical care to these bush communities becomes Milo’s life-long quest, one shared by his wife Betsy, a registered nurse. In 1940, with Betsy by his side, Milo heads north to Alaska, then still very much the Last Frontier. His goal, as he wrote at the time: "to grow up with the country.”

Growing up with the Country

During the next 60 years, Milo and Alaska will face many challenges and great change. Throughout those years, in word and deed, Milo will be an unrelenting advocate of improved Native health care. He will serve heroically in the Aleutian Campaign during WW II and write about it for The Saturday Evening Post. As a bush pilot and pioneering physician, he will come to know Alaska and its people in uniquely broad and intimate ways. He, along with Betsy and other Alaskans, will feel the devastating impact of the Good Friday Earthquake. Milo will help bring new medical advancements to Alaska and also rail against the creeping bureaucracy that threatens to sap the very spirit of the Last Frontier.

An Alaskan Legend

Doc Fritz became renowned throughout Alaska. Upon his death in 2000 at age 91, state flags flew at half-staff for two days “in memory of Milo H. Fritz, doctor, former state legislator and pioneer, and in recognition of his service to the people of Alaska.”

Senator Ted Stevens, Milo’s longtime friend and former colleague in Alaska’s House of Representatives, gave a tribute to Milo on the floor of the U.S. Senate, saying, in part: 

 … He left a legacy of caring and hard work and love of people and of his profession that will be hard to match. He gave his all, over and over again, whether in a distant village or in his office in Anchorage, and Juneau and Anchor Point. I was not only fortunate to serve with him in our legislature, I was also one of his patients, so I know first hand of the excellence with which he accomplished whatever task was before him.

And the Man Behind the Legend?

Milo was unquestionably a driven man. What were the sources of that drive? What interior and exterior forces influenced Milo over the course of his long and heroic life? How did Milo navigate through the public triumphs, the quietly borne setbacks and tragedies? 

Linda has set out to explore such questions in this rigorously researched memoir about her uncle, a deeply human portrait of the man behind the legend.

Guided by her own memories, diaries, and family correspondence, Linda relies primarily on Milo, with Betsy’s help, to tell his extraordinary tale and offer insights about his inner life. Abundant clues reside in the writings, correspondence, diaries, interviews, photographs, records, scrapbooks, and ephemera in the staggeringly large archives that Milo and Betsy had amassed for Milo’s intended, but abandoned, autobiography—all left to the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

During Linda’s last visit with her aunt in 2008, Betsy, frail but regal in her wheel chair, officially threw down the gauntlet, “You do it," Aunt Betsy said. "You tell Milo’s story.”

The resulting memoir of Milo Fritz offers an intimate portrait of a man who was shaped by Alaska and who helped shape the course of Alaska history, especially its medical history, for over half a century. It’s a story about a man who found his destiny in Alaska. It’s the story of a man and his beloved Alaska growing up together.  

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