Joint Committee Chairman Had Personal UHS Grievance

The chairman of a Medical Area women's committee which is pursuing a formal grievance against a University Health Service (UHS) gynecologist has previously been treated by that doctor and had filed a complaint against him, sources confirmed yesterday.

But members of the Joint Committee on the Status of Women said yesterday that the committee's current grievance was motivated by a large number of complaints brought to the committee by other women, and not by the previous experience of the chairman, Judith Herzfeld.

The grievance charges that Dr. Paul I. Winig '62 performed too many Caesarian section operations during a five-month period.

Herzfeld and Winig have both declined to comment on whether Herzfeld ever filed a personal grievance.

'Not Unilateral'

But Herzfeld yesterday said the committee's current complaint "obviously was not a unilateral move, since an individual cannot influence hospital statistics."

"None of the business of the committee is ever ledby any one person," said Linda Brink, a committee member and research associate in Pathology at the Medical School.

She said she is aware of other women's complaints that had been brought to the attention of the committee. "The original problem was that there didn't seem to be a process" for filing grievances against doctors, she added.

She and other members pointed to the statistics submitted to a review committee at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) for analysis last spring and subsequent figures provided by UHS officials, as evidence that their concern over Winig's practices is not limited to any single incident.

The committee first filed the grievance with UHS last April 21, basing it on delivery delivery room statistics, which committee members said were maited by an anonymous source.

The text of the grievance also cited a "consistent pattern" of complaints received by the committee concerning allegedly had gynecologic and obstetric practices by Winig.

A hospital practice committee at BWH last spring reviewed the operations cited in the grievance and concluded that all were medically appropriate.

Since then, the committee has argued that Winig's percentage of Caesarian sections is still statistically too high, and urged further analysis of the data.

Herzfeld assumed the chairmanship of the committee in midsummer.

"Many, many of us are very concerned about this, and we are not taking it lightly," another committee member, who asked not to be identified, said. "There's no question that a lot of Caesarian sections are being done."

Committee members contacted yesterday all expressly denied there was any validity in a recent anonymous letter to The Crimson The letter cited Herzfeld's previous complaint and accused her of pursuing a "personal vendetta" against Winig.

Copies of the letter were anonymously sent to the joint committee and apparently distributed elsewhere in the Medical Area.

Dr. Warren E. C. Wacker, director of UHS, said yesterday he had heard that some Med Area deans and committee members had received copies of the letter. Wacker refused to comment on the specific contents of the letter, but called the sending of it "despicable.