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The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: \u0026nbsp;The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/226/313/small/TAYLORROBERTANDANITA%2810-20-23%29.mp4_1706021517.jpg?1706021519","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - TAYLOR_ROBERT_AND_ANITA_(10-20-23).mp4"]},"duration":4783.832,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/226/313/small/TAYLORROBERTANDANITA%2810-20-23%29.mp4_1706021517.jpg?1706021519","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/226/313/original/TAYLOR_ROBERT_AND_ANITA_%2810-20-23%29.mp4?1706021515","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":4783.832,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313/transcript/64267","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Robert Taylor, M.D. and Anita Taylor, MA ed [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313/transcript/64267/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"John Saultz:My name is John Saultz and I am a member of the Board of Curators of the Center for the History of Family Medicine. Today, it's my pleasure to collect an oral history from my friends and mentors, Bob and Anita Taylor. The Board of Curators keeps a list of all the people whose oral histories have been recorded. This is a prestigious list of people, but I was shocked when the two of you were not on there yet. I figured I would leverage my relationship with you to correct that deficiency.\n\nThe point of today is just to collect information and stories about your lives and your careers with family medicine. I'm honored to be able to collect that information and to spend the afternoon with you today. A good place to start would be, just if you would, tell us where you were born and about your childhood and family life growing up, at least through the time you went to college. We'll have each of you do that, so maybe you can tell the story up until you meet each other, the story where you were separate and not yet “Bob and Anita.”\n\nBob Taylor:All right. I grew up in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a little town in Monongahela Valley, down south of Pittsburgh. This is where they used to have steel mills side by side down that valley. The fathers of my friends all worked in the steel mills. The ones who didn't work in the steel mills worked in the coal mines. My role models there were doctors. One lived across the street and one lived right next door.\n\nI  grew up as a young man saying, \"I want to be a doctor.\" I never wavered from that. Went to Monongahela Public High School, played football and basketball. I did well academically. I received a basketball scholarship to go to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, central Pennsylvania. Went there, played basketball, joined Sigma Chi fraternity.\n\nAfter three years, I decided I wanted to go to medical school, so I applied to four medical schools in my junior year of college and almost by return mail, Temple Medical School said, \"You're accepted if you send us $500 right now.\" I never did have a medical school interview. I sent them $500 and I went to Temple Medical School on North Broad Street in Philadelphia. I went there and enjoyed it. I enjoyed living in Philadelphia. While in medical school, I met Anita, she was at Bryn Mawr College.\n\nAnita Taylor:I was born in New York City, a very different place from where Bob was born, and my father was born in Spain. He had the buying office for a department store in Havana, Cuba. My mother was born in Pennsylvania and they met in New York City. I was born in 1940 and I was an only child. A lot of it had to do with the fact of the war and the draft boards and all the rest of it.\n\nIt was a very difficult time for people to think about starting a family. As it turned out, I went to public school the first six years, in Upper Manhattan, near Washington Heights. Then, we moved to the suburbs, to Forest Hills in Queens. I went to a parochial school, Catholic school for two years. Then, I went to a private school for four years for high school. The end of high school, I was third year, we start the applications for colleges.\n\nI applied to probably nine or 10 colleges. I don't know why so many, but I went to visit a lot of them and I always said, \"I'm going to go to Bryn Mawr.\" As it turned out, I went to Bryn Mawr and majored in sociology and met Bob my junior year. \n\nThere were four guys and four of us from Bryn Mawr who were meeting, and all the girls went down on the train, on the Paoli local. We met in the train station and we went off to see a concert at the University of Pennsylvania. By the time the evening ended, the roads were cleared of snow and he had the car and he drove me back to college. Basically, he said, \"Well, I'll give you a call.\" I said, \"That's fine.\" \n\nBut he was going off for the weekend and he called back on Sunday and said, \"I want to see you again.\" It was like two days later. I said, \"Okay.\" The rest is history. We got married that summer because he had vacation time. In medical school, the only time that you had vacation, at that time, back in the late 50s, was that you really got two weeks and that was it. The rest of the time, you worked.\n\nBob Taylor:At Temple Medical School, right at that time, they did away with the rotating internships and they all became specialty specific internships. So, my senior year in medical school, we were the interns and that gave me a great deal of clinical experience. I went into internship clinically ahead of my classmates because I had had so much experience that senior year. We senior medical students rotated from service to service, like an intern.\n\nJohn Saultz:You graduated from medical school in what year?\n\nBob Taylor:1961.\n\nJohn Saultz:1961. Of course, that was eight years before there was any family medicine. You were then looking at choices about graduate medical education that probably were a rotating internship or some specific specialty. What was your thought process about how you wanted to pick what to do next?\n\nBob Taylor:Well, remember the draft was always a factor then. What a lot of people did, they served their draft time and then they went into specialty training then in the Berry Plan. I grew up in a small town. My role models there were small town general practitioners. That's what I went to medical school to be. When I finished medical school, that was my career path.  I decided, \"Okay, I also have to get service time out of the way.\" I took an internship in the US Public Health Service Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia.\n\nNow, that puts me in uniform with a medical branch of the Coast Guard. Spent six weeks on a Coast Guard Cutter in the North Atlantic while I was there. Then, I stayed on for two more years at that hospital and that satisfied my service time. We lived in Norfolk, Virginia, in a garden apartment. We've gone back and looked at it, it's tiny. I can't imagine we lived in that little apartment with one and then had another child, but we seemed to survive it.\n\nThen in 1964, I finished my service time. There were a few general practice residencies around. Matter of fact, there was one in the hospital I was in, a two-year GP residency, but there weren't any family medicine residencies as we now know them. I placed an ad in JAMA. I said, \"Young general practitioner leaving the service, looking for a practice.\" I think I've got 200 replies.\n\nI visited some places and eventually joined three doctors, who became a four-doctor practice, in New Paltz, New York, about 90 miles north of New York City.  Anita's parents were in New York City. New Paltz was a beautiful, picturesque college town in the Shawangunk Mountains in the Hudson Valley of New York. We bought a house and moved up there, practiced with this group for four years. Then, it really became apparent that we had different views of how medicine should be practiced.\n\nI left that group, but I stayed in New Paltz. I'd signed a restrictive covenant that said if I left, I couldn't practice in town. I went 500 yards over the town line and designed and built an office, 1,500 square feet, hired a staff. In that office, we did everything. I had x-ray and a laboratory. We did blood tests, ultrasound. It was really full-service, because we were 18 miles from a hospital.\n\nAnita Taylor:But you went to the hospital.\n\nBob Taylor:The hospital was Kingston New York Hospital. It was 18 miles away. People would really bring a lot of problems to the office that otherwise they would go to the hospital. Those were the days when hospitals were just beginning to have emergency rooms. These emergency rooms were kind of makeshift.\n\nEvery doctor on the staff had to take their turn covering emergencies. You didn't want to get sick the night the psychiatrist was on. We were just starting to have coronary care units. That was a four-bed unit next to the nurses’ station. We just designated it as the coronary care unit. \n\nJohn Saultz:You were training in the Public Health Service. Was that mostly hospital rotations?\n\nBob Taylor:Yes. My internship was hospital rotations.\n\nJohn Saultz:Okay.\n\nBob Taylor:It was about a 150  bed general hospital, but in the US Public Health Service, they served a very wide range of constituencies. The Public Health Service hospitals began as the Marine Hospitals; the Merchant Marine set these up. Then kind of early, 50 years before, they sold them to the government and the US government took them over. They became Public Health Service hospitals, but the agreement was that merchant seamen from all countries, including the US, could get free care there forever.\n\nWe also were the medical branch of the Coast Guard. We did Coast Guard physicals in our hospital. All Navy dependents could come there. Norfolk is the world's largest Navy base, and so we had a lot of Navy dependents. That gave us our woman's ward in the hospital, and children, we had a children's ward in the hospital. For my internship, we rotated from one service to another, just like a rotating internship.\n\nJohn Saultz:Then when you got to New Paltz, it sounds like you had a pretty well established idea in your head of what you thought as a general practitioner or family doctor, what it was you would be doing there.\n\nBob Taylor:Yes.\n\nAnita Taylor:Remember, you were head of the outpatient clinic at the Public Health for two years.\n\nBob Taylor:I finished my internship and then I spent two years as head of the outpatient clinic. We were also in the emergency room. Then, I left that and went to New Paltz. I did full scale family medicine, except obstetrics.\n\nBob Taylor:We were 18 miles from the hospital. Looking back at it, joining a practice 18 miles from your hospital was not a good idea. Particularly, with back roads in the winter. We did everything, but I remember going to the hospital and doing spinal taps and things. I assisted at surgery, the whole nine yards.\n\nJohn Saultz:Now, Anita, did you have anything to do with that practice? I know you probably had little ones by then.\n\nAnita Taylor:Well, we did, but I also definitely remember being, when he became a solo doctor or even when he was with the group, he would take calls and as it turned out, people would call him all hours of the day and night when he was on call. It isn't like you had office hours and nobody calls and you had a service, an answering service. They didn't have that. You just called at home, because everybody knew your number.\n\nAnita Taylor:I started helping out in the office a little later on. I actually became a certified medical assistant. At the very end of his practice, before he went to academics, I was working full-time in the office, doing a lot of things. I was answering the phone. I was doing the administrative work. I always did the books when he was in solo practice. It was a family practice, and it was our family too. The money came home every night, because people paid cash and you bring it home and we take it to the bank and pay our bills.\n\nBob Taylor:Taught her and everybody that worked in the office knew how to run the blood test machine. Draw blood. She knew how to draw blood. She learned on my father. Develop X-rays. I was the doctor, so I had to push the button on the X-ray. But after that, everybody learned how to develop the X-ray.\n\nJohn Saultz:I know that after, as you were practicing there, the notion of book writing began. I know some of that story, but I think that you guys are most known in family medicine for the prolific nature of your book writing. I'm assuming until before New Paltz, there were no books written.\n\nBob Taylor:No, there weren't.\n\nJohn Saultz:How did the book writing career begin?\n\nBob Taylor:All right. I got in my head I wanted to write a book and I was doing trade books as opposed to professional books for doctors. I wrote a trade book around in the early 70s called Feeling Alive After 65. One of my patients gave me that title, and it was a healthcare book for senior citizens and Arlington House Publishers published it. I went on television to advertise the book. I did two more books with them. \n\nThen, I wrote a book on symptoms. If you have a headache or abdominal pain, what might you have? I sent it around. I wrote the whole book and sent the whole manuscript all typed out to publishers, including Harper and Row Publishers.\n\nSomebody there, wisely or fortuitously, said, \"This is too complicated for normal people,\" and threw it over the transom to the professional side of Harper and Row, Harper and Row Medical Publishers. I met my editor there, Chuck Visokay, who was a mentor to me in publishing. Chuck said, \"I want to publish this for doctors and maybe nurse practitioners.\" He published this book, he called it A Primer of Clinical Symptoms. We went on to do  two more.\n\nThe next one was Common Problems in Office Practice. The next one was called The Practical Art of Medicine that actually included pictures of everybody in our family pretending to be patients. Then, Chuck left Harper and Row Publishers and moved to Springer Verlag. It's a German publisher, but their offices were in New York. They had the two top floors of the Flatiron Building, which is kind of fun to go there and go to the top floors of the Flatiron Building in New York. One day we went just to visit Chuck, and this would be about 1974. Went to visit Chuck, went to lunch. He said, \"Bob, I hear of this new specialty, family medicine. You're one of them, aren't you?\" I said, \"I guess so.\" By that time, I had taken my boards. I took my boards on the second round. I said, \"Yes, I'm a board-certified family physician.\" He said, \"How'd you like to do a book on family medicine?\"\n\nI said, \"Well, what do you have in mind?\" He said, \"An edited book. I want you to get other people to write chapters.\" I said, \"No, Chuck, I work alone.\" He said, \"No, Bob, I think you can do this.\" I said, \"Oh, okay, I'll do it.\" I undertook this about 1974-75. Now I had to find people to write book chapters, but I didn't know anybody, because I was in rural practice up in the Shawangunk Mountains in New Paltz. So I kind of identified the leaders in family medicine, mostly through AAFP, and targeted those who were in academic positions, but there weren't enough of them, so I had a lot of people that weren't in academic positions.  I wrote them letters, inviting them to write on this topic and that topic and the next topic. You do cardiology, and you do electrocardiography, and you do computers in family medicine, and you do dermatology. At the end of the day, after a lot of letters, I had assembled 133 people who would agree to write book chapters. When the process began, I didn't know a single one of them. \n\nAnita Taylor:We met many of them at AAFP meetings. \n\nBob Taylor:It was all in the mail. We would go to the AAFP meeting and schedule meetings with these people on our list; we'd have meetings there on the exhibit floor and recruit them to do chapters. Oh, you're interested in gastroenterology? You got it. Dan Ostergaard with AAFP told me one time, Education Director Tom Stern found out what was happening, that some guy in New York is recruiting people for a book in family medicine, and said, “who is this guy?\"\n\nI didn't know any of these people and they didn't know who I was. But pretty soon, the chapters started coming in and I learned something. The early leaders in family medicine, particularly those who went into academic positions, had not written an essay since college. Most of them were not good writers. They gave me the material, but it was not...\n\nJohn Saultz:That good.\n\nBob Taylor:Not good. When it finally all came in, I took a month off, because I was still in solo practice. I took a month off practice. We rented an Olivetti typewriter, and Anita and I sat home and heavily edited, some might say rewrote, these chapters. I had a couple of people who in the end were not happy with me.\n\nBut eventually that book was published in 1976, and the first review was in Lancet, which is a British publication, one of the four top general medical publications in the world. The Lancet Review said, \"This is the Cecil and Loeb of family medicine, and every library should have it on a pedestal.\"\n\nJohn Saultz:That's a nice thing to get said about it.\n\nBob Taylor:That was wonderful.\n\nJohn Saultz:It was the first, right?\n\nBob Taylor:That was the first edition-\n\nJohn Saultz:First edition.\n\nBob Taylor:... of Family Medicine: Principles and Practice. I borrowed the title style from Sir William Osler.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:Family Medicine: Principles and Practice is now in its eighth edition, still going. It went under various iterations. But now, Paul Paulman and his group in Nebraska has taken it over because I'm 87 years old.\n\nJohn Saultz:You had some associate editors. There was a group of four people.\n\nBob Taylor:Yes. Melville Rosen, Bill Jacott, John Buckingham, and Ed Donatelle.\n\nJohn Saultz:How did you get them?\n\nBob Taylor:Well, it was kind of the same thing. I didn't know these people. All right. One, Melville Rosen, who I never met, was a chair at Stony Brook. I asked him to write a chapter, a very prestigious man. He said, \"I don't write book chapters, but I'll be an editor,\" so he became an editor.\n\nJohn Saultz:Okay.\n\nBob Taylor:Let's see, Ed Donatelle was in North Dakota. I tried to get people from different geographic areas. Bill Jacott was in Minnesota and John Buckingham was in Alabama. I didn't know them at the time, but they signed and they were willing to be editors. An author would send me the manuscript, I would send it off to the section editor. They would look at it and bless it and send it back to me. Then, I would edit.\n\nJohn Saultz:Of course, this was at a time, I know from having worked on, I think, chapters with you for the third or fourth edition of the book, before word processing. These were all paper documents that were mailed.\n\nBob Taylor:Manuscipts were all over our dining room table for months.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yes.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah, there were paper manuscripts. We would mail them back and forth. If one of the associate editors had a comment to make, he'd make it on yellow glue-on tags that you licked.  \n\nJohn Saultz:Before the Post-it note was invented?\n\nBob Taylor:Before the Post-it note, so you would attach these to pages. When it was all done, the manuscript, 3,000 pages in two large cartons, was carried to the publisher, and they took it on. Now you do books, there's no paper, no paper involved anytime, but it was all paper then.\n\nJohn Saultz:Anita? It sounds like you were helping with the logistics there-\n\nAnita Taylor: Oh, yeah.\n\nJohn Saultz:... but maybe some writing too?\n\nAnita Taylor:No. No. Not in that book.\n\nJohn Saultz:How did your writing get started?\n\nAnita Taylor:When you're doing something like that, you start to learn what you need to know in putting together a book. Yeah, I think a lot of it was just talking. Chuck Visokay came and he lived in our home for- \n\nBob Taylor:A couple of days. This was the guy from the publisher. \n\nAnita Taylor:... from the publisher, yeah. He helped a lot. It was really an interesting process, as I think about it, that we just sort of learned on the job. \n\nAnita Taylor:I was also writing for the local newspaper.  I just realized that.  I was with the local newspaper, which came out weekly, the New Paltz News. I was the reporter for all of the town and village board meetings.\n\nBob Taylor:They paid you $7 to go to the meeting and write it up.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yeah, seven. Right. There was virtually nobody going to these meetings very much at that time. I'd be sitting there, and whatever I wrote in the paper was what people learned about the meeting.  I did that for years, until I became a real estate broker. Then, I stopped doing the news reporting because I found that that was a bit of a conflict. \n\nJohn Saultz:Bob, it sounds like you were a pre-med student and a basketball player when you were in college. Where did your writing interest and talent come from?\n\nBob Taylor:I'm not sure I can answer that. I just always enjoyed writing. I could write themes and essays very quickly, very easily. As I got into practice, I was writing articles for throwaway medical journals.\n\nJohn Saultz:Like things to give to patients that are-\n\nBob Taylor:No. Physicians' Management and Medical Economics. Matter of fact, before I started the books, I was on the board of the Physicians' Management magazine, which is not around anymore. I would write an essay and they'd give me a nice payment for it. I wrote on how staff meetings can improve the flow of your office and how to interview a new employee, things like that. Things I had learned in my private solo practice.\n\nJohn Saultz:Now, was it somewhere around this time that you worked on a book about medical marriages, right?\n\nBob Taylor:No, it wasn't about medical marriage.\n\nAnita Taylor:No, it was, about couples.\n\nBob Taylor:It was something about relationships.\n\nJohn Saultz:How did that come about? \n\nAnita Taylor:It's a good question. I have to think about that. \n\nJohn Saultz:Was that around the same time, you think?\n\nBob Taylor:We were in New Paltz. We were in New Paltz for that.\n\nThat took us on the national television tour. The publisher for that book had a very good publicist.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah, you got on Good Morning America.\n\nBob Taylor:He got us on [the] Good Morning America television show for a week.\n\nThey moved us to New York City, put us in a hotel. Every morning at 7:00, they would send a limo for us.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah, I remember this story, which is why I asked.\n\nAnita Taylor:Acropolis Books. \n\nBob Taylor:The title of that book was: Couples: The Art of Staying Together.\n\nAnita Taylor:... Staying Married, yeah\n\nBob Taylor:It was a goofy little book, but it was a good publicist. \n\nAnita Taylor:It may have been a goofy little book, but it's what everybody wanted to talk about. \n\nBob Taylor:We were staying at this hotel in New York City. Every morning, they would pick us up in a limo, take us over, and we would-\n\nAnita Taylor:To ABC [studios].\n\nBob Taylor:ABC. We would be live with David Hartman.\n\nJohn Saultz:David Hartman.\n\nBob Taylor:Live on Good Morning America. I remember one night, we went to a restaurant in New York, because I told Anita, nobody's watching it. Just two guys, nobody's watching it. Then at the restaurant, somebody says, \"We saw you on television this morning.\"\n\nJohn Saultz:Well, somebody was watching.\n\nBob Taylor:Well, they were.\n\nJohn Saultz:So, there was around a five to 10-year period between when family medicine was started as a specialty, and you were a first-generation diplomate of the board. By the end of that decade, you had written this reference book.\n\nBob Taylor:Edited.\n\nJohn Saultz:Edited the reference book, and some writing too. Probably more writing.\n\nBob Taylor:Maybe wrote a little.\n\nJohn Saultz:But how was your thinking about family medicine, as a field, changing during that time? It must've been amazing to talk to all these people. You had your idea about your practice, but now there's this national thing happening. How was that for you?\n\nBob Taylor:Family medicine, at that time, was revolutionary. It was kind of like the Revolutionary War. There were, and these people contributed to my book, a lot of them were department chairs. I used to call them the warrior chairs. Ed Donatelle, Ed Ciracy was one, Jimmy Jones was one, and they had to fight tooth and nail for recognition in academic medicine.\n\nLaurel Case was the first chairman in Oregon. He came as a private doc into the academic medical center. Suddenly, they anointed him. \"You're a professor and chairman.\" He had no background in the internal infighting and battles of academic medicine. He survived. A lot of them did, some of them didn't and you just didn't hear from them again.\n\nJohn Saultz:Did you feel like you were sort of a true believer in that revolution?\n\nBob Taylor:Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah. It kind of captured people. It was a cause. It became a cause for people.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yeah. \n\nJohn Saultz:I was coming along through medical school in those years, but it felt like I was joining a cause.\n\nBob Taylor:A crusade.\n\nJohn Saultz:A crusade, exactly. It is very difficult to explain that to people now.\n\nBob Taylor:They take it for granted.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yes.\n\nBob Taylor:Somebody said, it may have been Gayle Stephens, I think it was, \"We have to be institutionalized.\" We've got to be accepted into the institution. Well, we have been. We have been institutionalized. That's good. Everybody takes it for granted. Family medicine is now part of the institution, but we have given up a lot of our revolutionary zeal.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah. Yeah. Somewhere around this time then, you're probably getting ready to move to Bowman Gray, to Wake Forest, right?\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah. I was in solo practice for 10 years. Toward the end of that time, I was doing this book, which was a big project-\n\nJohn Saultz:Absolutely.\n\nBob Taylor:... out of my dining room and my copy machine that would do one copy at a time, but it put me in contact with all these people now in academic medicine in these burgeoning departments. I became aware that I'm editing this book on my own time and my own resources. Now, if I go into academic medicine, they'll give me the resources and the time to do this.\n\nJohn Saultz:In theory. Yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:In fact, they did.\n\nJohn Saultz:Did you reach out to medical schools or did they reach out to you more?\n\nBob Taylor:I had one school, I won't tell the name of it, that just at this time, came and said, \"We're starting a department, do you want to come and be the chair?\" I said, \"No, I do not want to do that. I don't even know what FTE stands for.\"\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:I said, \"No, I don't want to do that. I don't have the skills, but I think I will go join a department and get the skills to be a chairman.\" I looked around at a number of departments around, and I settled on Bowman Gray. Bowman Gray, which is now Wake Forest University. They had a strong department that was expanding. They had a new building; somewhere they got a lot of federal money. It was the family medicine building. They had their own building right on campus.\n\nI joined that department. It had a strong leader, Julian Keith, a North Carolina kingmaker politician family doctor. He'd been the chair of the city council, that sort of thing, I was the fourth family physician they recruited. I joined that department and it was a strong, well-funded department. I spent six years there, learned a lot, learned a lot of things to do, learned some things not to do. But at the end of that time, I decided, okay, the time has come and that I want to be a chairman.\n\nJohn Saultz:What was the role they recruited you into? Was it just a faculty position? I think you had a title about research, right?\n\nBob Taylor:Oh, that was funny. Yes. Because in private practice, I had done, first with the group and then alone, I had done three research studies that got published. Today, they would be thrown immediately in the trash, but this was 50 years ago.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah, yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:They got published. One having to do with treating ear infections with penicillin versus some other new antibiotic.  I used battery powered audiometers to test kids' hearing a week after we treated them with this drug and that drug, and wrote it up, published. When I went to Bowman Gray in a new Family Practice Department, my CV had three publications. Three.\n\nJohn Saultz:That was a lot then.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah, this was published in the Journal of Pediatrics, that one I just told you about. That's a prestigious journal. The Department anointed me the Director of Research. There was also a research wing. There were some legitimate researchers, but somehow, they anointed me Director of Research.\n\nJohn Saultz:What was your daily work during the time you were there? You were seeing patients some, you were teaching some, what was your breakout of your time?\n\nBob Taylor:Part of my time was to do hospital rounds. You take your turn on that, your turn on the call, but I saw patients three half-days a week. That was luxurious.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah.  That must have felt easy coming from full-time practice.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah. The rest of my time was kind of unstructured to help residents and students do this and that. Teach in predoctoral education, although we didn't have much undergraduate role there at Bowman Gray, \n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah. Anita, how was this transition from New Paltz to Bowman Gray for you?\n\nAnita Taylor:It was an interesting transition, because I realized that I'd been working full-time in the office, and as a certified medical assistant, I could definitely get a job in some doctor's office. I could work even at Bowman Gray in the department or in another department doing that kind of work. I said to myself, \"No, I think I want to do something a little bit more academic, since he's going to be doing it.\" I went and applied to Wake Forest University's graduate program, and I was accepted.\n\nAnita Taylor:I had to take the GRE and all of that again. I'd never taken it, because I'd finished with a bachelor's degree and didn't really think I'd go to graduate school. But at age, I guess, 38, I went back to school. For full time, I got my Master's of Education degree and I wrote a thesis on medical specialties. That's what really started my whole interest in medical specialties, because all I really knew was the growth of medical specialties was coming, but I didn't know how students chose medical specialties.\n\nAnita Taylor:I was curious to know how it was done. I ended up doing a lot of research at Wake Forest and doing kind of the same thing that Bob did, writing to doctors all over the country. I, at that point, had become a member of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine. That was the other big change for me was when Bob went into academics and he, in 1978, joined STFM. So, I joined STFM. Now, I did not have an advanced degree at that point. I had a bachelor's degree, but Nick Zervanos sponsored me. He wrote a letter, and I was always grateful for that.  We'd met at meetings, because we'd been going to AAFP meetings and I was always there going to the meetings with Bob and learning things, going to different sessions and kind of hanging out with them. I found that, yeah, I was a member and that was very exciting for me. I started to write to people just like Bob had, that I didn't know, and asking them if they wanted to talk about their specialties.\n\nJohn Saultz:It sounds like a fair amount of it was talking to physicians about how they had made choices about their specialty.\n\nAnita Taylor:Exactly. And what did they do. \n\nJohn Saultz:This was really talking to physicians after the decision, looking back at their decision, as opposed to talking to medical students.\n\nAnita Taylor:No, I wasn't talking to medical students yet. \n\nJohn Saultz:... people who had made the choice.\n\nAnita Taylor:Right, exactly, and what advice would you give?\n\nBob Taylor:The book's title was: How to Choose a Medical Specialty, and the audience was medical students.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yeah, the audience was medical students, but it was doctors in private practice, doctors in academics who gave advice. \n\nJohn Saultz:This started off as a thesis for your master's degree, but how did it get to be a book?\n\nAnita Taylor:Well, it got to be a book, because of the contact we made with Saunders Publishers.\n\nBob Taylor:I was doing a book for Saunders, called Difficult Diagnosis. I'm sitting with my editor there and Anita's in the room. She says, \"I want to do a book too.\" She says, \"I have this idea.\" She pitched this idea to this senior editor at WB Saunders Company. He says, \"Okay, do it.\"\n\nAnita Taylor: Al Meyer.\n\nJohn Saultz:Cool.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yep. It was cool.\n\nJohn Saultz:That book was then published when you were still at Bowman Gray?\n\nAnita Taylor:No, I carried the manuscript with me. \n\nJohn Saultz:On the move to Oregon?\n\nAnita Taylor:Yes, I carried it on the plane, because I didn't want it lost. It was hand typed; the whole thing was hundreds of pages and I packed them all and carried them on the plane and brought them to Oregon.\n\nBob Taylor:Now, in its sixth edition. Still active. \n\nAnita Taylor:Still active. Yeah. \n\nJohn Saultz:Do you guys feel like we need a break? We've been going at this for 45 minutes and I'm happy and doing well.\n\nBob Taylor:I'm okay.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yeah, I'm okay. \n\nJohn Saultz:Okay, so we're going to keep going.\n\nSo, when you chose to leave Bowman Gray, I assume you were specifically looking for a department chair position?\n\nBob Taylor:That's right. I decided I had been there long enough. I had learned what I needed to know to run a department. I had been Director of Research, then I had been a Director of Pre-doc, never Residency Director, but Director of Pre-doc. I had learned how a good, well-run department worked. The chair at Bowman Gray wasn't going anywhere.  \n\nIf he had retired about that time, I would have happily stayed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I made it known around the country that I was looking for a chairmanship. Now, if you think about it, there are a hundred and some medical schools in the country. Maybe 100 of them have departments of family medicine. At any given time, there might be 10 of those jobs open, maybe a dozen. That's your universe.  I looked at different places and looked in New Jersey, went to Oklahoma, went to California at UCLA.\n\nAnita Taylor:San Antonio.\n\nBob Taylor:I looked at San Antonio a couple of times. Bob Rakel eventually went there, but we went to Oregon and just kind of hit it off there and decided that that's the place I wanted to go. \n\nWe took the job. I remember, we came here for an interview, Anita and I. We went to the Western Forestry Center, they had a big reception. The dean had told everybody be nice to me. They were very nice.\n\nJohn Saultz:They were nice to you.\n\nBob Taylor:They were very nice to us.\n\nJohn Saultz:Was it the dean, was it the atmosphere? Was it the people that you met in the department? What were the main things that made it-\n\nBob Taylor:I saw potential here. I just thought there was potential. We had a couple of really good young people in the department and a couple of people who were kind of at the end of their careers, which I facilitated, but no, I just thought I saw potential.\n\nJohn Saultz:This felt like a good thing to you too, Anita?\n\nAnita Taylor:I felt like it was time. His career, at that point, what was definitely what was going to propel us in our life. It had to be. I certainly was very embedded in Winston-Salem. I was very active in a number of things, community things, as well as I was on the board of the Medical Auxiliary.\n\nI had founded the Medical Auxiliary in New Paltz, New York, and had been involved in the Medical auxiliary in New York State. Then, I moved to Winston-Salem. I got involved in the Medical Auxiliary in North Carolina. I really was part of the community there and was doing very exciting things. But I also knew that there were opportunities in Portland that we needed to come to.\n\nBob Taylor:And it's a beautiful city.\n\nJohn Saultz:It's a beautiful place.\n\nAnita Taylor:I really wasn't planning to work in the department at that point. We were going to get settled. We were going to look around and see. I knew I would get connected. As it turned out, I ended up being president of the Multnomah County Medical Auxiliary and got involved in the state board. \n\nJohn Saultz:At the time you were making this transition, were there any departments or people that were sort of role models for you? \n\nBob Taylor:I'm going to tell you one person, that was Lewis Barnett. Before I knew I was leaving Wake Forest, coming to Oregon. During that interval, I went around and I talked to some chairs. The main one was Lewis Barnett, who was the chair at University of Virginia.\n\nJohn Saultz:That's a pretty good one to talk to.\n\nBob Taylor:He was a pretty good one to talk to. I got a lot of good ideas from him, a lot of good advice. One of the things that he was doing there was he had a program where medical students who were interested in family medicine would come to the school the week before matriculation and go with family doctors.\n\nJohn Saultz:You thought that sounded like a good idea.\n\nBob Taylor:That sounded like a good idea. We brought that to Oregon, and really Anita initiated that.\n\nAnita Taylor:Summer Observership.\n\nBob Taylor:Called Summer Observership.\n\nBob Taylor:In its heyday, we would have 30 students out of the class come early and spend a week with a rural family physician.\n\nAnita Taylor:The class was only 90 students, at that time. It was a smaller class than it is now. About a third of the class had had that experience.\n\nJohn Saultz:That was an idea that kind of came from Lewis?\n\nBob Taylor: Yes.\n\nJohn Saultz:But I can remember, medical students are often biting at the bit to get going. It's not a hard sell to say, \"Come a couple of weeks early.\" \n\nBob Taylor:They lived in the homes of their preceptors.\n\nJohn Saultz:And it connected them to the department.\n\nBob Taylor:You had to be careful. If there were a group of five doctors, they'd put the student on call every night with whoever's on call. It would tend to wear them out. We'd have to caution them against that.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah.\n\nAnita Taylor:It was wonderful.\n\nJohn Saultz:Now we're starting to get into the point where a couple of years after you arrived is when I got recruited there, but you had a well-established vision in your head of what sort of faculty you were trying to bring in there, what you were trying to build as the foundation of the faculty. \n\nBob Taylor:First of all, although I was not skilled in obstetrics, given my private practice experience, I said, I'm not going to recruit my residents and become inbred. That's changed. But at that time, when I came there, we had a faculty of six people, including me. Our faculty meeting was in my office. We sat in a circle. Now, I think there's over 200 faculty members, but in 1984 there were six.\n\nJohn Saultz:She just passed 220.\n\nBob Taylor:220.\n\nJohn Saultz:It's a scary thing, isn't it?\n\nBob Taylor:But I said, \"I am going to recruit outside.\" What I had in mind was, I am going to recruit the best people I can find, have them come here, serve their tenure, and go on and be leaders across America. That didn't actually work out, because I recruited really good people, but they stayed. Like John Saultz and Scott Fields.\n\nThey stayed.\n\nMy other criteria was they had to do obstetrics.\n\nJohn Saultz:Right.\n\nBob Taylor:I found that was the litmus test. If they interviewed and said they didn't do obstetrics, I wasn't going to hire them. I wanted people coming here who were clinically active.\n\nJohn Saultz:Okay. When you were in New Paltz, you weren't doing obstetrics, and yet, between then and when you came to Oregon, this occurred to you... Because I will tell you, Bob, as somebody you recruited here, when I look back at the decisions the department made over the course of my relationship with it, I can list four or five that I think we're seminally important. We would not have become the top department in the country if we hadn't done that. This is probably the first of them. It was really important that we got great clinicians.\n\nBob Taylor:Yep.\n\nJohn Saultz:I remember when we recruited Glenn Rodriguez, we were looking for a geriatrician who did obstetrics, and there's not a lot of those.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah, that's right.\n\nJohn Saultz:But we stuck to our guns, and we did that until we were well past having a big enough faculty that we couldn't all do obstetrics anymore because of the volume of deliveries.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah, right.\n\nJohn Saultz:I've always thought that was a litmus test. Obviously, it's a call schedule thing too.\n\nBob Taylor:Yes.\n\nJohn Saultz:Because if people can't take call with the whole thing, then somebody's on call every night with the OB stuff. But was that just that idea you had because of your clinical experience, or had you-\n\nBob Taylor:I think that was my idea.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah. It was here when you recruited me, I didn't have anything to do with that idea.\n\nBob Taylor:No. When I came here, we had about six people on the faculty. We had one person doing obstetrics, Mike Prislin.\n\nJohn Saultz:Okay. Well, I think that was important, because very soon after I arrived in '86, which is two years after you became the chair, we were looked at as great doctors by the institution. Ophthalmology was sending all of their pre-op evaluations to us.\n\nBob Taylor:That's right. I remember that.\n\nJohn Saultz:That was a big deal. They fired the internal medicine clinic and started sending all of their pre-op physicals to us, because we were seen as better doctors, more available to them. I think the obstetrics thing, that's a lost thing today in many places around the country.\n\nAnita Taylor:That's a lost thing.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah. This was then and now is now.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah. Now, it's a little different. So you were looking for people who had that fellowship training, who were residency trained, who were young movers and shakers types, and you put a lot of energy into that recruitment.\n\nBob Taylor:Yeah.\n\nJohn Saultz:It took two or three years after you were there for any curriculum time to happen.\n\nBob Taylor:In the predoctoral setting.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yes.\n\nBob Taylor:We were able to get five hours in the undergraduate curriculum for health promotion. I came to Oregon in possession of a tape called Death in the West. Death in the West was about smoking. It turned out the Reynolds tobacco people had given a company in England a big grant to do a film about smoking and lost track of what they were doing. They then produced this film that showed all these cowboys who had been smoking Marlboros riding around their horses with oxygen tanks.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:It was moving. When the tobacco company found out about this, they confiscated almost all of those tapes and it became a black market. We showed that tape to the students. We took the students then on one session over to the gym and tested their exercise ability. I don't think we do that much anymore either. But the real breakthrough came is when we wrote a grant to have a rural rotation, and we got a nice big grant, three or $400,000.\n\nNow, if there's anything that really can move the pendulum in academic medicine, it's a big grant. They kind of had to give us curriculum time. Somehow written into that grant was, the curriculum time had to be in the third year. You don't want it in the fourth year, because career decisions have been made by then. You want it in the third year. There was, I think it was vacation time.\n\nAnyhow, we got six weeks for rural rotations in family medicine in the third year, because we wrote a grant and they couldn't give the grant money back. The way it was written, they had to give us the time, so they gave us the time.\n\nJohn Saultz:I remember when I joined the faculty, the first couple of months that I was here, I had to go to that health promotion class and teach a class about fad diets. I was thinking, \"Why am I talking about fad diets?\" Of course, we were trying to get our faculty around medical students any way we could.\n\nBob Taylor:Any way.\n\nJohn Saultz:We had them there before medical students started with the observership. We had a student interest group. You might want to talk a little bit about the student interest, because we sort of got a franchise here about that.\n\nAnita Taylor:Oh, yes. Yeah. Our student interest group was a power group. We took students to the national meeting. They just...\n\nBob Taylor:15 or 20 of them.\n\nAnita Taylor:Oh, yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:Flying them to Kansas City, putting them up in a hotel, four in a room.\n\nJohn Saultz:You raised money for that?\n\nAnita Taylor:Yeah. We raised money. The students were, they kind of just learned everything about family medicine in a way that would probably never happen on campus. You had to go out and see the power of it at that point. Those meetings in Kansas City were pivotal. The student interest group, we had dinners, we had awards, we had all sorts of wonderful things that we were doing with them. They still are, as far as I can tell. It is a powerful group. There are now other specialty interest groups, but they started after us.\n\nJohn Saultz:In other specialties.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yeah, in other specialties. It just sort of snowballed with that. But no, I think that was a really powerful thing, and I was in charge of that. But that most likely all happened towards the end of the 80s, I'd say. We had been in Oregon for maybe four or five years. \n\nThe other thing is that the medical school allowed me to interview at Bowman Gray. When we came to Oregon, I was also interviewing medical school applicants. \n\nAt Oregon and also in Winston-Salem, I started the medical student couples’ group. I did that in North Carolina, and I did it in Oregon when we came. It all sort of fit together, lots of things.\n\nBob Taylor:One of our biggest adventures here was when we found out that we were allowed by the bylaws of OHSU Hospital, family medicine faculty were allowed to admit patients to pediatrics. But pediatrics interpreted this to mean we could send them our patients, but they would manage them. We decided we wanted to manage our own patients in the hospital and have our own service in pediatrics. The chairman of pediatrics at that time \n\nWe went up to the pediatric floor in what was Doernbecher Hospital. It was the 13th floor of old, before the new hospital. We had a reception for all the nurses. We told them how we're going to be admitting our own patients here. There was really kind of a showdown. The Pediatrics Department took us to the medical board of the medical staff, and it was a gunfight at the OK Corral.\n\nI remember saying in that meeting to the chairs of the other departments on the medical board, \"The family doctors of Oregon, there's 600 and they mostly refer patients here a lot. If you all decide that you believe that we family doctors, who are part of this 600, are not qualified to care for our own pediatric patients, I don't know what those 600 family physicians that currently refer here are going to feel about that.” They voted and they decided we were qualified to admit to pediatrics.\n\nJohn Saultz:But those were, I think, examples of, you can't just sit around trying to protect what you have all the time. You have to go out and make things happen that are needed to happen. You need time with the students. You don't have curriculum time. Well, then let's get time with the students outside of curriculum time, and we're going to build a demand, so that the students want us.\n\nAnita Taylor:Right.\n\nJohn Saultz:If the students want us, that'll make it easier to sell the idea. I remember we started the ambulatory clerkship with the general internists that later became the family medicine clerk clerkship.\n\nBob Taylor:Yes, it did.\n\nJohn Saultz:Which is another delightful story too, maybe for another day.\n\nBob Taylor:Nobody in family medicine did C-sections. Well, then we graduated a resident, Scott Fields. While he took his family medicine residency here, he had done more C-sections than a lot of graduating OB residents.\n\nWe went to obstetrics and said, \"We would like Dr. Fields to do cesarean sections here.\" \"Well, how many has he done? That many? Well, okay, well, we've got to proctor the first five.\" \"Fine. You can proctor the first five.\" With Scott and then later others, we were doing our own C-sections.\n\nJohn Saultz:Yep. Well, and the argument was these small hospitals around don't have obstetricians. If the family doctors there can't feel safe doing these procedures, it affects access to maternity care.  This is, in fact, a bit prescient, because today a lot of rural hospitals don't do obstetrics anymore because they don't have any physicians who can do that. \n\nBob Taylor:How do you do obstetrics without the sections?\n\nJohn Saultz:Anita, I think one of the most amazing things that happened was when you were elected to membership in the AAFP, which I don't know that that had ever been done for someone who wasn't a physician before. I remember being very moved that they had done that.\n\nAnita Taylor:I remember, it was Marc Carey who was the student member of the AAFP Board of Directors. Marc Carey, I believe, is the person who suggested that AAFP consider me for honorary membership in the AAFP. It was incredibly moving to have him do that. \n\nBob Taylor:She's one of a handful of non-physician members. It isn't more than three or four.\n\nJohn Saultz:I think you might have been the first.\n\nBob Taylor:I may have been. \n\nJohn Saultz:Then, I remember Bob, when you stepped down as the chair, you had a retirement banquet at the Oregon Art Museum. Dan Ostergaard came all the way from the AAFP office in Kansas.\n\nBob Taylor:He did.\n\nJohn Saultz:He gave this speech about the two of you being a team. I still remember that speech. That was very special, because I think you've been a very effective team with each other. You brought academic skills that you had kind of hardwired yourself. You learned those writing skills by getting with the publisher and by the school of hard knocks.\n\nAnita Taylor:Hard knocks, yeah.\n\nBob Taylor:A lot of hard knocks.\n\nJohn Saultz:But I know that's what the faculty, like me, who came here, I came here to learn that from you. I would've never, ever, ever, when I was interviewing for a job here, think that I would've ended up a medical journal editor. That was not in my skillset at all. That was not something I was even interested in. The fact that I got good enough at that to be comfortable with it, well, that's all on you.\n\nI do think that that worked out. It's the blend, isn't it, of the clinical rigor and the academic rigor. So many departments make the mistake of trying to shortcut one or the other. They either do all this clinical work and get lost in it and don't create any new ideas. Or more commonly, they have a department that isn't very good at medicine.\n\nBob Taylor:They forget about the students too. We are a medical school, and if it weren't for the students, do we need to be here?\n\nAnita Taylor:And I think they forget about the spouses, both male and female. One of the things that I felt strongly, and Bob fortunately agreed, it was important for me to be part of the team. It just worked out that I enjoyed it. I was interested. I can't say it's true for everybody, but I think the fact that I was very honored to be allowed to do it, but I also felt I could contribute things. One of them is role modeling for young married, couples who are in medical school.\n\nWe had a number of couples and the fact that the spouse, both male and female, could be included in activities, even going to the national meetings. We would include the spouse as well, because it was part of the life. My parents actually worked together, even though my mother did not have an official role, she was very much part of my father's work. Bob's parents, again-\n\nBob Taylor:They worked together. \n\nAnita Taylor:He was a salesman, and she would address thousands of advertising envelopes every month. It was something that she could do to support the work that he was doing. I think that has really been, to me, something that I could contribute. To say, \"It's okay to come to a meeting with your spouse and understand what they're doing in their life.\"\n\nBob Taylor:Along that line, again, you've got to put this into context, about 50 years ago, there weren't many women physicians at all.\n\nAnita Taylor:That's right.\n\nBob Taylor:We were recruiting for faculty and we insisted that they come to interview with their spouse.\n\nWe said, \"We're interviewing both of you.\" We had a couple of instances, they'd say, \"We make it a rule to have totally different lives. We don't talk about work at home. I don't have anything to do with her work or she with mine.” I didn't hire them. We wanted to hire a team.\n\nJohn Saultz:Well, that I think was really appealing to us when we interviewed out here. That's harder to pull off today.\n\nBob Taylor:It is. Very different today.\n\nAnita Taylor:Very different today, yeah. \n\nJohn Saultz:Because even when people have related careers, even when it's two physicians or two attorneys, there's this sense that if I get too close, I'll either be subsumed within the career of my spouse or I'll be conflicting. And see, you guys, it never... I think that's something that you did really, really well with your lives. You've stayed married how many years now?\n\nBob Taylor:63.\n\nJohn Saultz:63. That's not bad. That's not bad at all.\n\nAnita, I wanted to ask you one other question. Bob talked about how as he's gotten into the most current edition of the textbook, it's being done by others. You've gone through multiple editions of the textbook about choosing a medical specialty.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yes.\n\nJohn Saultz:I wonder, I don't want to finish without asking you to comment about how much has the way that book is written changed from edition to edition? Is it different now what you have to say about that than what you would've said 40 years ago with the first edition?\n\nAnita Taylor:It's had chapters added to it to talk about the different types of jobs you can do in medicine. Because in the past, there were really not as many diverse opportunities, so I've added sections on that, but it's still pretty much who you are and how your personality and your skills really fit what you're going to be doing in life to be happy, to be fulfilled in your job. There are personalities for each of the specialties.\n\nI also am very involved with Myers-Briggs. I think that that was another piece that I used a lot with the medical students in helping them understand themselves. Because even though I'm not a psychologist, my whole focus of my career has been on understanding yourself and what you do in life. I think that fits in with the work that you're going to be doing as a physician. I don't think it's changed. Surgeons are surgeons, family doctors are family doctors. Different points of view and personalities.\n\nBob Taylor:I once had a dean at lunch say, \"We would not have to pay our surgeons. They would operate even if we didn't pay.\"\n\nJohn Saultz:Because they love it.\n\nAnita Taylor:They love it. That's the beauty of medicine is that if you love it, how wonderful it is. But there's other opportunities to use your skills if you find out that the clinical part isn't necessarily the right place for you. That's what I've tried to impress upon them.\n\nJohn Saultz:I think the other thing that I admire a lot about you guys is that you seem to have transitioned into being retired faculty members and you're happy and that's gone well for you. For people who are listening, do you have any advice about how to do that well?\n\nBob Taylor:We've moved into a senior community. Now, this probably isn't for everybody, but if we had stayed living where we were, I might go up to the department from time to time and be the old guy hanging around where everybody else has a task and I have no task. I'm just in their way. By moving where we are, we're in a community, a retirement community in Virginia Beach, 700 people. It's like a small town, very involved.\n\nWe have lived there for eleven years.  I was Chair of the Health and Wellness Committee, driving changes for good health there. I have been the President of the Resident Association. A few weeks ago, Anita finished a two-year term as President of the Resident Association. We're very involved in our community. I wrote a health column for the local newsletter.  \n\nAnita Taylor:When we first moved to Virginia Beach in 2012, the first thing we did was we made contact with the medical school in Norfolk, the Eastern Virginia Medical School. We got on their faculty, their volunteer faculty, and we spent five years maybe interviewing applicants to their medical school.\n\nBob Taylor:We also gave some lectures there.\n\nAnita Taylor:We weaned ourselves, but we couldn't really get away from medicine, because it was just such a part of our life. \n\nBob Taylor:We're in our 80s now. I'm in my late 80s. It's a 40-minute drive to EVMS. In the winter, through the snow and the ice, the interviewing just got to be too much.\n\nAnita Taylor:But also, we weren't as connected, because we weren't part of the full-time faculty. We started to realize that. The students would come and have lunch with us at our community and we'd realize that it was getting harder and harder to be up to date on what they needed to know as far as applying to residencies, things like that. It was a weaning away, but we just didn't break completely.\n\nBob Taylor:What we find ourselves doing now is mentoring grandchildren of residents where we live who want to go to medical school.\n\nAnita Taylor:They still come and talk to us. Yeah, they call us and they come in and they speak with us.\n\nJohn Saultz:All right. Well, are there things I should have asked you? Did we not get into every corner of the story that we should have?\n\nAnita Taylor:Well, there was a lot of international stuff we've done. We were in Japan seven times to do lectures and talks. Again, we did it together. I spoke about things that I was working with. I spoke about medical marriage. I spoke about choosing specialties. Bob spoke about clinical things and about departmental things.\n\nJohn Saultz:You haven’t shared how the relationship with Japan happened, because I think that's worth capturing.\n\nBob Taylor:That's a good story. This goes back 20 years, I think.\n\nJohn Saultz:At least.\n\nBob Taylor:I was invited to give a keynote address at a WONCA, World Organization of Family Physicians meeting in Seoul, Korea. One young physician, his name is Ryuki Kasai came up and said, \"Dr. Taylor, would you and maybe your wife like to come to Japan and speak? We're thinking it might be nice to try to get family medicine started in Japan.\" We said, \"Sure, we'll do it. Sure. Sure.\" I didn't think any more about it.\n\nNext thing you know, I got an email invitation. I'm back in Oregon, and received an invitation from this person, \"Would you like to come to Japan? We'll fly you business class. Give you a little stipend. Why don't you come for two weeks?\" We went . When we got to the Nartita airport, I had forgotten what Dr. Kasai looked like. \n\nJohn Saultz:Big airport.\n\nBob Taylor:Big Airport, and there's all these people out there greeting their families. I'm standing there looking and finally somebody's jumping up and down, \"Dr. Taylor. Doctor.\" It was Ryuki Kasai. He was there. He and Takashi Yamada, the two of them took us to Okinawa. Went to the caves there and gave some talks in Okinawa. Then, we went to various places up through the main island, to Tokyo, and up to Sapporo.\n\nIn two weeks, we did the whole of Japan, giving talks, I think, almost every day. The gist of the talk was, \"You doctors in practice can teach. You have things you can impart to students and trainees.\" That was our message. We went back another year, there were a couple of residencies. Back another year, there's more. There's more. Now, there's a whole network of residencies. They teach in medical schools. They have a certifying exam, and they have a whole family medicine empire. But along the way, they said, \"Let's exchange some people. Why don't you have somebody come over?\"\n\nWe had one of our young woman residents, I can't remember her last name. We were going to send one person over. She wanted to go. We sent her to Japan. I got a call from Takashi, I think it was. He says, \"Where is she? She didn't get off the plane.\" We had misunderstood the International Date Line. She's coming the next day.  Then, we sent a whole lot of people, Jen Devoe and her husband went over, and more, and more. Now, many in the Portland department have been to Japan. It's a real enterprise.\n\nJohn Saultz:It's all in the relationship. They have now endowed a professorship in the department, but it's been a challenge during the pandemic when people could not go back and forth. But was a powerful relationship that you created. You went and you did that talk, and then it built over time. When they gave the department the endowment, I don't know. I think you had probably already moved.\n\nAnita Taylor:Yes.\n\nJohn Saultz:The foundation at OHSU could not understand why this network of Japanese hospitals was giving all this money to the family medicine department. Like, \"Why are they giving that to you? What exactly, did you agree to?\" It was kind of like, \"Well, we didn't agree to anything. We've been in a relationship with them for 20 years. We've done things for 20 years. It's a relationship in working with them. It's not transactional.\"\n\nThe fact that Daisuke and Chi and other people that are fluent in Japanese, work in the department has been important to them. But anyway, I think success comes out of things you never expect to happen, but you're just open-minded to.\n\nBob Taylor:We met Daisuke in Tokyo, Japan. Because one time we were in lectures, in Japanese, he's sitting beside me, translating for me.\n\nThat's when we first met him.\n\nJohn Saultz:Well, thank you very much for taking the time to do this.\n\nBob Taylor:Well, thank you for taking the effort to set this all up. We really appreciate it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/121430/file/226313#t=0.0,4783.832"}]}]}]}