When talking to a doctor who has served as ship”™s M.D. on 37 cruises, including aboard a replica brigantine, it”™s only a matter of time before Patrick O”™Brian comes up.
O”™Brian is the author of best-selling seafaring books; the movie “Master and Commander” was based on two of them. Sure enough, Charles Starke, ship”™s doctor, internist with the North Star Medical Group in Briarcliff Manor and senior attending physician at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Tarrytown, knows the books. Then he says something that elevates the conversation entirely: “Do you remember the surgery scene? When the surgeon operated on himself?”
No one who has seen the movie could forget it ”“ by turns riveting and repulsive as the ship”™s doctor pulls a bullet from his own gut.
“I did that,” Starke says while he rolls up his pants leg. “It wasn”™t a bullet. I fell down the engine room stairs.” With the pants rolled up, the skin below the knee reveals a chevron-shaped scar big enough to have exposed plenty of knee grizzle and more details of the human shinbone than would be appropriate in polite company. “I always carry a surgical stapler,” he says, demonstrating the position he assumed to suture himself. “There were 16-foot seas. I went on deck because the light was fading. There was no painkiller.” His assistant was a veterinarian ”“ “not very much help” ”“ but his participation promoted a joke: “Afterward,” Starke says, “I started growing a gray coat and a tail and my wife started calling me an ass.”
Starke”™s wife is Mary. His son Robert is following in his father”™s Albert Einstein College of Medicine footsteps, studying neurosurgery, and his daughter Katherine was just married in India and is living there.
Starke is something beyond a Renaissance man. His master”™s degree is in theoretical particle physics. When he left Princeton in 1968 ”“ physics major, magna cum laude ”“ he was accepted into Harvard Medical School and Harvard”™s doctoral program in particle physics. He said no to both, opting to work with Nobel physics laureate Chen Ning Yang at SUNY Stony Brook. In 1972, with a master”™s in particle physics in his pocket, he reapplied to Harvard Medical School and was reaccepted. He studied instead at Albert Einstein. While a medical student, he volunteered with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in the Australian Outback.
Sculpture is one of his many interests. He once contracted an artist to carve a Balinese totem pole of his family with the four members depicted as monkeys. That was but one of three totem poles he has owned: The others were from New Guinea, a 12-footer; and from the Northwest Coast, a 9 ½-foot carving with a 7 ½ -foot wingspan. His first sculpture was a gift for his high school girlfriend and, now 62, he has completed 20.
Starke is a ham radio operator of the highest classification, able to tap out 20 words per minute via Morse code. He meets Thursday mornings with a ham operators”™ group and says, “We had nine there this morning. That”™s pretty good.” With his radio, he practices medicine all over the world as NX2T. He remotely suffocated a bot fly burrowing into a woman”™s stomach off the Galapagos Islands ”“ Vaseline, he knew, would do the trick. In another case of radio medicine, he treated ciguatera poisoning ”“ caused by a fish toxin ”“ in which, among other symptoms, sensations of hot and cold are reversed in the nerve endings.
Besides direct medical care via radio, Starke is the author of “Medical Care at Sea,” a CD primarily for yachtsmen.
Starke sails a Trintella sloop named “Dawnpiper,” which he keeps in New Rochelle. In 2005 he crewed aboard “Whisper,” a 120-foot sailboat that skimmed the waves from the stern of the U.S.S. Intrepid in the Hudson River to Cowes, England, in 14 days, 10 hours and 23 minutes, earning First in Class honors in the Rolex TransAtlantic Challenge.
Starke swims to keep in shape. He walks briskly, including right out the door of Phelps on a cold recent day, without a coat and appearing like a man without a care in the world. His portfolio is in his car. He points out the dots and dashes on the license plate: his ham ID in Morse.
Starke keeps up with a few contacts in physics. He reads stories of heroic survival. Â
Starke excels in photography. Fifty-two framed pictures line Phelps”™ walls. They are the stuff of a National Geographic magazine “best of” retrospective. Starke uses a Nikon D-700 camera. His subjects include the grounds of the Rockefeller estate, the prismatic qualities of a dragonfly”™s wings, the symmetry of icebergs and the asymmetry of leaves and ice embracing. He has a thing for penguins and they reciprocate for the camera with their good sides. He fed a rose radioactive dye for several days and then photographed it with an X-ray machine. So many people asked about his photos that he now sells prints for $600. “I just sold a print of that one,” he says pointing to a penguin. The number to call about his photos is 762-4478.
If people are lacking in the photos along the hospital walls ”“ and they are ”“ they are not absent from the Starke portfolio: cultures spanning the equator from Easter Island to Bora Bora to Tonga. They rival in technical and artistic quality his nature photos.
As for more medicine at sea: “I”™d go anytime, anywhere.”
