Medicine: Jimmy Orr's Fateful Journey

The Rev. James Robert Orr was finishing a rugged five-year tour of duty sowing the Protestant gospel on the stony soil of Brazil's Parana state, near the Argentine border. Now the gaunt, 59-year-old Baptist was heading home for Canada. With his wife and their three youngest children, he jeeped into Laranjeiras do Sul (pop. 2,000) and went to a local doctor for certificates of vaccination. Told that the Orrs had all been vaccinated six or seven years earlier, the doctor perfunctorily issued "certificates of immunity."

Three weeks later, just as perfunctorily, health officers at New York's Idlewild International Airport took the certificates...

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