Patients Don’t Want Doctor, 90, to Quit Now

Archie Steele turned 90 Saturday, and it appears he is slowing down.

The Los Angeles doctor who still makes house calls sees only 15 to 20 patients a day. While that may be a good day’s work for some physicians, it is a trifle compared to the 139 patients he treated on his best day, when he was a fresh 60.

Large feats seem to attend the diminutive Steele, a dapper general practitioner with precise manners who has crossed the Pacific in boats he designed and built and who is probably one of the oldest practicing physicians in Los Angeles. Of his graduating class of 58 at the Loma Linda University Medical School, only eight are still alive and only Steele still sees patients.

He jokes about the distinction, asking a friend, “Isn’t he old ?”

It’s not that he has an obsession about incisions, he said. His patients won’t let him quit. “They have a feeling that no one else can do the job. I had a girl the other day--she’s 90--I treated her parents.” The family, she said, will have no other care.

Since he closed his office several months ago, that care has become a bit unorthodox. He has no nurse on the two days a week he works. Now, he may give an injection in the breakfast nook of his green stucco house on the Westside. And he worries that the medical society might disapprove of such things.

Even though he reached a landmark age, he did not celebrate Saturday. Of parties, “I don’t care for them,” he said in his definitive, proper way.

Steele grew up in Nova Scotia with the feeling that doctors were “a bunch of bums,” partly because his mother was sickly. Local doctors treated her surgically by removing organs from her body when she took ill. But she remained in poor health. “They had taken everything out they could take out,” he said, so they finally recommended she get pregnant, thinking that might cure her.

It did, eventually. When he finished medical school, Steele diagnosed his mother’s colitis and brought her blood pressure under control. She lived to be 97.

The son of a boat builder, Steele saw no reason why an urban environment and a busy medical practice in California should interfere with his hobby. So, in the small yard behind his office on Pico Boulevard, he designed and built boats as big as 57 feet.

Once, he made a comical sight perched atop the frame of a half-built boat, hammering away in his white coat. When the bell rang, he hopped down, pulled on a stethoscope and rushed in to see his next patient.

Dr. Walter Mcpherson, a member of Steele’s medical school class, said Steele is unusual in that “when he decides to do something, he does it.”

He entered one of his home-built boats in the 1941 yacht race from San Pedro to Honolulu and won it. He copyrighted a rounded bow boat design that is now in use among sailors.

One of his prized possessions is the steering wheel from the private yacht of Hideki Tojo, the man who ordered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

One friend said he has an ornery side. When asked why he never became an American citizen, he recited his experience coming by boat from Canada to the United States for the first time. The Canadian part of the trip was lovely, he said, but the American boat was dirty. He still recalls, 60 years later, the insulting response he got from a crew member when he asked the name of a mountain.

Steele, who has two children but lives alone, said he has thought seriously of quitting practice altogether. But patients have literally begged him to see them. “I have patients that call me for a prescription. They should pay me for an office visit. But most do not have much, so I do it,” he said.

He’s not sure how much longer he will continue practicing, but he said, “I feel that I still have my wits about me.”