{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/3j3902178t/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Joe Stallings"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"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.  Disclaimer:  The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’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. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2016-02-25 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Sam Taggart (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["Video File"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Rural Medicine","Arkansas","Family medicine","Family physician"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Joe Stallings, MD (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"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/000/293/432/small/JoeStallingsM.D.DVD.mp4_1759332228.jpg?1759332231","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Joe_Stallings_M.D._DVD.mp4"]},"duration":5077.69763,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/293/432/small/JoeStallingsM.D.DVD.mp4_1759332228.jpg?1759332231","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/293/432/original/Joe_Stallings_M.D._DVD.mp4?1759332191","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":5077.69763,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432/transcript/84871","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Joe Stallings interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432/transcript/84871/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview with Dr. Joe Stallings\n\nGood day….it is 2/25/16.   This is Sam Taggart with the Arkansas Physicians Oral History Project.  We are here in the home of Dr. Joe Stallings of Jonesboro, Arkansas and the AHEC (Area Health Education Centers) Program of North East Arkansas.  Dr. J. P. Bell and I will be doing the interview.  Thank you for inviting us into your home.  Just to start, let’s start from the very first: When were you born?  \n\n“I was born in Morrilton, Arkansas, June 22, 1947.”\n\nSo, you are of the first class of baby boomers?\n\n“Yes.”\n\nTell me a little bit about or do you know anything about the circumstances of your birth:  were you born in a clinic, or in a hospital, or at home? \n\n“I was born in a hospital.  In Morrilton, there are some hills and then of course Petit Jean Mountain is not very far from Morrilton; but, the hospital was on a hill, our house was on a hill and my middle name is Hill. So I said, “Born on a hill, live on a hill, and name is hill.”  I didn’t really like that name; but, that was my great grandmother’s maiden name.  It was a hospital and there was a doctor who I think might have been Dr. Etheridge.  The big thing about it was me; I weighed 11 lbs.  My mother always didn’t hesitate to tell people that I weighed 11 lbs and I almost killed her.  I just said, “I wasn’t involved in this except being there.”        \n\nDid your family live in the country or town? \n\n“Morrilton, Arkansas was probably 3,000 or 4,000 then; so, it was a very small town.  We had, my father and uncle together, a farm together; so, we were at the farm every day.  I was pretty much in a farm family.  They also had a feed mill; so, they made feed and sold feed to other farmers.”  \n\nWere you on the north side or the south side of the river? \n\n“We were on the north side of the river.”\n\n What kind of farming did your dad do?\n\n“Everything, we had some rope crop, which would have wheat and soy beans, and we had cattle, pigs, chickens, bee hives, horses, any kind of live stock that you might imagine, we had.”\n\nThere was a lot of live stock around more at that time?\n\n“Yes there were.  There were small farms and people would come to get feed and you may remember that they had the gingham on a certain high class feed they called “Blue Ribbon Feed.” The gingham, actually it was cotton; it had a pattern to it.  Women would take those and \n\n\nclean it and make clothes out of the feed sacks.  So, I would help load these sacks on and they would be pointing to the ones that they wanted.  Now, I might have to move four or five sacks to get to the one they wanted; to get four or five, but it was an experience.” \n\nSo, you essentially lived on a farm?\n\n“Right.”\n\nHow many brother or sisters do you have?\n\n“I have two older sisters.”\n\nAny extended cousins?\n\n“I have two cousins that were in medical school.  Alan Stallings was one year ahead of me and my cousin, Walt Stallings was one year behind me.  We went to school all the way though Morrilton, Morrilton High School, Hendrix College, and medical school; one, two, three, like that.”\n\nWere you three close?  \n\n“We were close.  We saw each other a lot.  We were on the farm together.  We were picking up hay bales.  We worked together and got along fine.” \n\nAt what age did you start working on the farm?  Do you remember?\n\n “I just remember that I would go with my father in the morning, we would always come home for lunch and eat lunch, and we would always lie down to take a nap.  I would not wake up from the nap, he would have left without me, and I would be so mad. So, I would imagine that I was around five or six years old when I was starting to go to the farm with him.”\n\nTalk about some of the fond memories you have of your childhood or bad memories you have of your childhood, whichever you prefer.  \n\n“I have nothing but fond memories.  I reflected on it not too long ago. My dad, his brother, and their sister, all worked in a very small environment at the feed mill.  Every time I came, they were always happy to see me.  They always smiled and obviously happy to see me and I realized not too many years ago that they really liked to see me.  I would hang around there and I would get paperclips out and do stuff.  When I got a little bit older, I got a BB gun and the sparrows would be coming in to eat the excess grain on the ground, I could take a sparrow out pretty quickly.  I probably wasn’t older than seven or eight then.”       \n\nHow far was the feed mill from where your house was or where you lived?\n\n“A couple miles maybe. I would get on my bike and ride over there; so, it was not bad as we rode everywhere of course. ”\n\n\nThinking back to your childhood, do you think of your childhood as being poor people, middle class people, or rich people?  Was there any differentiation in your mind?    \n\n“Well, it kind of changed throughout my childhood.  I said I have two sisters, I had obviously a mother and father, we had a grandmother who lived with us, and had another young lady whose family couldn’t afford to send her to school that came when she was a teenager.  She came and lived with us.  She lived in the house with us, she helped my mother prepare food and clean.  She went to school to finish her school.  She went to RN school and became an RN. She married a man from Morrilton who was a physician and a psychiatrist.  So, I always tell people,” I live with five women and one daddy.” And, there was one bathroom, ok.”\n\nHow big of a house are you talking about?\n\n“I had to sleep with my next to oldest sister together. No air conditioning.  We had a ceiling fan and then we had an isolating fan in front of us.  So, you remember how hot it would be and when that fan would come in your direction, you said, “Aw, that was good!” then when it went the other direction, it was really bad. So, it was three bedrooms and of course, we had a sleeping porch; I don’t know if you remember.  You have screens on a sleeping porch and you try to catch the breeze and in the summer time, everybody slept out there.  I do remember we did get an air conditioner, one window unit that we put in there for my grandmother.  We turned it on when it was so hot and we would stand in front of it and think, “Oh my gosh, how can this work? How can this be?” I had a good childhood.”   \n\nTalk a little bit about your school: About elementary school, junior high, and high school; that type of thing.\n\n“Every school that I ever went to, including medical school, I lived no further than one or two blocks. So, I walked to school every day throughout my life.  I could come home and eat lunch with my mother.  I started kindergarten I guess when I was three or four years old; kindergarten wasn’t a universal thing like it is now.  It was a half a block from my house.  One day, I got a little pissed off and I just left the kindergarten and it was up the hill and across the street.  I went up the hill and my mother looked and said, “Where did you come from?” and I said, “I just walked back.”  That was a no, no; I wasn’t supposed to do that.  I wasn’t supposed to cross the street.  I loved school.  I loved kindergarten.  I loved school in any way, shape, or form.  I love to be there. I loved my friends.  I loved to learn things and I don’t guess that stopped.  Some people felt like school was a burden; to me, it was a pleasure. I went to school early every day.  I was there before the school’s bell rang, stood and talked to friends, and was just very glad to be there.”  \n\nEven early on, did have have any special interests in school?\n\n“I liked everything. I liked everything and we had some very good teachers, specifically a very good math teacher. Everyone said she was a great teacher and she was.  She was glad see to us; \n\n\nour teachers were glad to see us.  They smiled and pat us on the back.  It was a very loving relationship and we felt it.”\n\nWhere there any particular teachers during that time frame in either elementary school or high school who had a real big impact on you?  An impact on you such that when you go back you can remember things they said or the way they phrased things?\n\n“Oh yeah, yeah, our math teacher was great. I took French in school, I guess I was in junior high school then, and I loved it.  Our teacher was so enthusiastic and taught us so much about France.  It was just a joy to be there.  We had an English teacher and a Latin teacher and she taught both; so, she was renowned as one of the best, May Hope Moose was her name.  She lived to be into her 90’s, I guess.  All the teachers were good.  They were interested in us as individuals.  They wanted us to do well.”\n\nDid you do well?\n\n“I did well.  I very rarely made anything less than an “A”.  When I got into high school, I was taking typing and I wasn’t very talented typing, ok.  So, the first semester I got a “B” and I was really sad.  I went and talked to the typing teacher and said, “I really want an “A.”  Then the next semester I got an “A”.  I was a salutatorian just behind one of my very best friends, James Lee Hargis, he was in our class together and we were close friends.  We weren’t really competitive as far as grades were concerned, but we both worked hard.  He was the valedictorian and I was the salutatorian.  He was smarter than me.”      \n\nWhere you involved in sports?\n\n“Yes, I started early in sports.  My dad wanted me to play baseball and I didn’t know how to play baseball, but there was little league baseball that was popular back then and still is.  He said, “Well, you’re going to go, you’re going to go and try out.” I didn’t even know how to put a baseball glove on, but, I went because we wanted me to and pretty much told me to.  I learned how to play baseball.  He ended up coaching several of our teams and it was very special for him and I got to the point where I enjoyed it and was fairly good.  I played football.  My parents bought me some shoulder pads and a helmet.  I would put the shoulder pads and helmet on and ride my bicycle across town to where I knew there was going to be a football game on Saturday just a get together of guys and I loved it.  I played in junior high and high school until the 11th grade and I had other things I had to do then.”\n\nHow big where you at that point?  \n\n“When I graduated from high school, I weighed 174lbs.”\n\nSo, you weren’t a tiny kid?\n\n“No, I wasn’t tiny; but, there were bigger people than me too.”\n\n\nWas Morrilton a real upper level class, like a class 4-A or 5-A, something like that?\n\n“I can’t remember the class, but sports were very much emphasized.  We played Conway and Russellville, schools that are a lot bigger now than when we would play.”\n\nDid you have then an extended group of friends during high school or in your childhood period?\n\n“Yeah, I think so.  Everybody was friendly, but I can name five or six that we really, really, enjoyed each other.  We were at our 50th high school reunion this summer and most of the people were there that I really felt were friends as growing up.”   \n\nHave you kept up with them?\n\n“Not as much as I would like.”\n\nIn what point during your high school years, obviously a serious kid in school and somebody who likes school, at what point did start thinking about what you wanted to be when you became an adult?\n\n“I tell people that when I grew up there was about 4 or 5 things that you could do.  You could be a farmer, which was an opportunity for me to do, you could be a businessman, you could be a teacher, you could be a lawyer, or a doctor.  There was no room for golf course management.  There didn’t seem to be any other opportunities for a career other than those four or five things.  To me, it boiled down to being either a farmer or as I thought more and more about it, a physician.   I had an uncle who was a physician in Little Rock.  He was a cardiologist.  He went to Johns Hopkins.  He, at that time, about all a cardiologist could do was give people a Nitroglycerine and pain medicine  for a myocardial infarction and they did have EKG’s; but other than that, they didn’t have, as you know, anything.  He was very jovial and always glad to see us, the grandkids.  Well, he wasn’t our grandfather; but, old enough to be our grandfather.  He was our uncle.  I was impressed with him, my physicians, everybody; they were nice.  They were always glad to see us.  They were respected, you could feel it, and that was one of the things I wanted to be.  I wanted to be like them.”\n\nDo you remember any particular physicians when you were growing up who you’d went to for various illnesses or had an impact on you? \n\n“Dr. Jack Mobley, his father was a family physician in Morrilton, he came to town and he was the young guy.  He practiced family medicine.  He operated on me for a hernia repair.  He was someone that everybody respected and everybody loved.  As you may know, he went on and went back and did a residency in urology and became the Head of Urology at UAMS later in his life.  He went to all the big schools and was a very nice guy. He is one that I remember very fondly”\n\nDid you write much as a child?\n\n\n“Do I write?”\n\nDid you write then, as a child?  Write your memories down or record your memories in any way?\n\n“No, not really.  I mean no, I didn’t.  I do a little bit now and it is kind of like a journal, or scrap book, or something.  It looks like a third grader did it; so, it’s not writ for publication.  It is written for me to remember things.”\n\nIs that something that you keep?  Do you have stacks of little note pads of where you’ve written things in the past?\n\n“I do.  My father could not write legibly.  He could write; but, it was just unreadable.  He had a typewriter; so, if he wanted us to read something, he would type it.  It wouldn’t be great, but he would type it and send me a letter if I’d asked him a question, like a financial question early in my practice, or this, or that.  I have maybe three or four of those, but that’s all I got.”\n\nAt what point did you start thinking about where you were going to go to college.  Obviously, you had already decided the idea of medicine was attractive.  Were there any people or persons who had an impact on you going in one direction or another?        \n\n“Everybody in our family went to college.”\n\nReally?\n\n“My mother and father went to college.  They met at Hendrix College.  Hendrix College, as you know, is only thirty miles from Morrilton.  When I was thinking about medical school, they had a good track record for people getting into medical school.  The summer before I went to college, you remember Sputnik had happened and we were behind Russia in space exploration.  Then the country woke up and said, “We don’t have enough people going into math and science.”  So, all over the country in universities, they put summer workshops together to interest people in math and science; so, I took off and went to LSU for six weeks.  I thought I was pretty smart.  I told you my friend, James Lee, was just ahead of me; but I thought we were probably very, very, smart.  When I got to LSU and I met people who had had a lot more opportunity and who were a lot smarter than I was, I kind of had my balloon burst, ok.  But, my mother and dad met there, it was very close, and going to LSU imprinted on my mind that I don’t want to go to a big school.  I want to go to a smaller school and I did and I have no regrets.”     \n\n Go back a little bit.  I think you understand how unusual in Arkansas it is for someone to say, “Everybody in my family went to college.” That’s unusual. Talk a little bit, if you know, about how your family came to be in Morrilton in the first place and who they were.\n\n“Ok, well my great grandfather was a physician and he came, it wasn’t Morrilton then; it was on the river as all towns were at that time in the 1850s, to Lewisville, ok. It was a small river town.  There was an old house there, an old two story house, called “The Stallings house” and I \n\n\nremember as a scout we went out and looked at it and I wish I would have taken pictures or knew more about it because it is not there anymore.  He is.  He was a physician during the Civil War and he was the representative to the convention to decide whether Arkansas would succeed from the Union.  He wrote a letter before Fort. Sumter to a friend that says something like, “We don’t want to fight those Yankee boys.”  Of course then Fort Sumter happened and Arkansas decided to succeed.  He was in the Confederate Military in some way; I think all physicians were conscripted, or went on one side, or the other.  There was a concentration area as the northern troops came through and concurred Arkansas.  Of course, they were brothers fighting each other, we all know that story, but he was conscripted to take care of people there.  He died of dysentery as so many other people did that were in concentration.”\n\nDo you know where he was when he died?\n\n“He was right there.”\n\nBy his home?\n\n“Well the camp may have been of some distance, but he is buried right there on the banks of the Arkansas River.”  \n\nDid the fact that your great grandfather had been a physician; did that have any impact on you in terms of thinking about medical school?     \n\n“Not at that time.”\n\nLet’s talk a little bit more about your family.  You said your father’s grandfather was in the Civil War.\n\n“Let me correct that in saying he was my great grandfather.  My grandfather had two wives; so, he skipped a generation.  So, it may be a little bit strange for me to have had a great grandfather in the Civil War at my age;  it should have been a couple of greats added on to that.”\n\nDo you know where they came from? Do you know where your family came from?\n\n“Yes, the Stallings family came from Kentucky.  My mother’s family came from Tennessee.  The Stallings go way, way, back.  I tell my kids, and I have a book that is really thick, and this book showed that I was kin to Attila the Hun, ok.  I told my daughters that and they said, “Dad, we knew that already.”  But, they were Vikings; the Stallings were.  They came into the north of England and there is actually a town named Stallingsborough up there on the tip of, well it’s Scotland now, the island.  Then I had my great grandfather’s, who was the physician, wife came from Ireland during the potato famine and the Irish were, as you know, starving and she came across  the Atlantic, up the Mississippi, then up the Arkansas River, and stopped there in Lewisburg.” \n\n\nI knew that you said that several members of your family had gone to Hendrix, is that what implied you to go to Hendrix?\n\n“That’s where my father went, where my mother went, and where they met, and subsequently became married; which happened also with my wife and I.  She is from Hope, me Morrilton, and we went to Hendrix.  We met very early during our college years and married in our third year of college.  We can talk about that later I guess. No, my other family members went to the University of Arkansas: my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin, John Robert Stallings, who was a mathematical genius.  You can look him up on Wikipedia.  He taught in Princeton and ended up teaching in Berkley; that helped me when I was taking calculus in summer school at Arkansas State Teachers, which is what it was called back then, in Conway.  I was trying to get rid of calculus because I didn’t think I was going to like it and I had to try to make an “A” in everything as we all did anticipating medical school.  The first day of class, he called me and said, “Joe Stallings come down, I want to talk to you after class.”  So, I did and he said,” Are you kin to John Robert Stallings?” I said, “Yes, he’s my cousin.” He said, “Oh.” That first semester, I got an “A”, thank you John Robert!  The second semester, I got a “B” and that was pretty much what I deserved, maybe lower, I don’t know.  No, there was an expectation in our family, my cousins; that we would all go to college.  That’s because, it wasn’t demanded; it was just, you were going to do it; it was a fact of life.”     \n\nWas your family religious?\n\n“My family went to the First Presbyterian Church, the only Presbyterian Church in Morrilton, Arkansas, every Sunday and every family night on Wednesday night.  I grew up in a church.  My wife and I still go to the First Presbyterian in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  There wasn’t any preaching at home; it was just on Sunday, we were going to go to church.  They didn’t say that; it was just, I wanted to go.  There was no requirement and there was no fighting or discussion about it.  I, in my young life, was so impressed with Albert Schweitzer, the physicians who went to Africa who came and talked to us as missionaries; not Albert Schweitzer, but we had missionaries that came and talked to us, and I thought that that was what I wanted to do.  I thought that I wanted to be a minister and that didn’t work out.  I thought that maybe I could do a better job as a physician.”\n\nNow Hendrix wasn’t the least expensive school you could have gone to.\n\n“You know, I didn’t even think about that and my parents didn’t think about that.  I did get a very small scholarship.  It wasn’t as expensive as it is now; but, I worked during the summertime on the farm and different places.  Work was always a part of our lives.  It wasn’t, “Are you going to go to work today,” it was just; we eat breakfast and go to work either at the farm or the grocery store, Dale’s Quick Shop, who gave me a job when I was 15. That was against the law; but, I got paid and learned a lot about the grocery business.  I still enjoy going to the grocery store.”      \n\n\nSame question about college as we had about high school and elementary school; were there people in college who really impressed you or turned you in one direction or another? Had a big impact on you that you can remember back now?  Things they said, things they did, or the way they went about things?\n\n“Well, everything was, as far as going to medical school, pretty much grade point average, ok.  We were gunning for an “A” and I wasn’t much of a gunner; but, my teacher in zoology, I really liked him and I did like the course; it was five hours long including the lab.  I made an “A” in zoology.  When I had five hours of that, I thought, “Hey, I might get in medical school.”  I took general chemistry and Dr. Stuckey, the teacher, called me in before the grades were announced and he said, “Joe, what do you think you deserve on this course?” I sat there for a minute and I thought, “I want an “A”, but I probably deserve a “B”, so I said, “An A”.  He looked at me and smiled and said, “I was thinking a “B”; but, I’m going to give you an “A”.   So, those two people and those two grades gave me more self confidence in my ability to go ahead and be successful.”\n\nWhen in the process of college did you start to think seriously about medical school and start the process of taking the MCAT and all the application process and all that kind of stuff? \n\n“It was about that time…… it was about that time.  I felt like a lot of people at Hendrix took calculus, and physics, they took everything in the first semester, and I could kind of see that they weren’t doing so well; so, I spread it out a little bit.  Like I said, I took calculus in summer school, I took physics later, I took my botany courses and biology courses first on, and I felt good about that, which I felt was probably what medical school would be like.  My grade point average was such that I could graduate with honors, but I had to do a project.  So, the first biology teacher I was talking to you about, I went to him and I said, “I want to do a project.”  I said, “I got the grades for it” and he said, “Ok”.  He was doing research on chironomidaes; it’s an insect that lives in the mud of ponds and lakes around here.  There was a special little gadget that you drop down, got a bunch of mud, and you pulled it back up, and pulled these chironomidaes up.  They’re red; it’s one of the few insects that have hemoglobin in them. So, that’s what he was studying and that’s what I studied.  He got some deuterium oxide and said, “I want to see what the varying degrees of amounts of deuterium are going to do to these chironomidaes.”  I said, “Ok, I’m all for it.”  I went out to Lake Conway with a dredge to get it.  It was blowing and storming and I barely had a paddle, no motor, and my best friend was with me, who is in the other room Mary Ann, and I am sure she thought we were going to die, because I thought we might.  She stuck with it and that was one of the first times I realized I’ve got the real deal here, ok.  We got some chironomidaes, high tailed it back, and fortunately, there were no tornados.  So, I did the study and here’s the study: it turned out that with the higher levels of deuterium in my study, the chironomidaes lived longer.  That’s not what was expected of course; but, I wrote the paper, presented it, and I graduated with honors from Hendrix.  That college, and maybe it’s all small colleges, becomes a part of your life and even as you graduate, you really wish you \n\n\nwere back there.  It took me about 15 years or so to lose my longing to be back at Hendrix and just to be a faithful graduate.”\n\nLets back up or not even really back up because you brought it back up: You met your wife in college.  Let’s talk a little bit about her.  You mentioned your wife’s name and where was she from. Add a little bit about her family and her background. \n\n“Mary Ann Bader.  She is from Hope, Arkansas.  She has one sister and her father was a pharmacist.  Actually, he was trained in the medical core in World War II as a pharmacist; and at that time, he could come back and be a pharmacist if he had another pharmacist that would supervise his distribution of drugs.  Really, really, nice people.  I saw her pretty early and was attracted to her.  I actually saw her in the Methodist Church one time when the church arrived and everybody come and I thought man, “I know, she’s pretty cool.”  Sadie Hawkins day came and she invited me to be her partner and that has pretty much been it since then.”\n\nWhen did you get married and start having children?\n\n“We graduated from Hendrix in 1969, got married in 1968, and then in medical school, we had our first daughter.”  \n\nObviously you were accepted to The University of Arkansas Medical School, did you apply other places?  Did you have any idea that you might go somewhere else besides the University of Arkansas?\n\n“I never even thought about it.  I was probably so naive that I didn’t even know there were other schools you could go to, ok.”\n\nSo you applied.  During your college years or maybe during your early medical school years, was there any crisis that might have slightly turned you in one way or the other?\n\n“Well at that time, you mean other than some peoples would say in the initial welcome to medical school, “ Look to your left, look to your right, one of those are going to be gone.”  I don’t remember that lecture, but there was quite a bit of fear that you weren’t going to make it in medical school.  So in my class and your class, I’m trying to think of his last name, Dave, a big guy, we were on a cadaver table, four people on a cadaver table: two on each side.  Dave was there, he’s older, and said, “Guys, they’re going to try to flunk you out, they’re going to try, they did it to me.” So, here we had a guy right there, one of four, that was coming back for the second time, ok.  One of my close friends at Hendrix was on the table with us, a another guy was there who he flunked out the first six weeks: a guy who had not made it, a guy who just didn’t make it, on the other side.  And after biochemistry, I think you will probably remember, the grades would come out 30s and 40s and they would have to grade everything on a curve; but people that had never made anything like that, it was a shock.  It was a shock to my friend from Hendrix and we had spent a summer up at the University of Arkansas in the department of Plant Pathology doing some research and deciding whether we wanted to do research or medicine.  It \n\n\ndidn’t take me long; I knew I wanted to do medicine, but he left.  So, here where these four guys: one had flunked out before, another had flunked out then, my friend left because he wanted to go and do Plant pathology at the University of Arkansas, and I was the only one left.”\n\nThat was on your table?\n\n“Yes; so, it was very stressful to say the least.”\n\nSo by Christmas, were you the only one doing the dissection?\n\n“No, the guy that was there left with me who had been flunked out the first year and was coming back for the second time, he was there.  He had a lot of experience; so, he would show me where everything was.”  \n\nSo talk about your first couple of years in medical school; not just that first semester, but the first couple of years: the education you got, things you did, things that impressed you, things you weren’t impressed with. \n\n “Well, I know that students sometime after we graduated decided they wouldn’t come to class.  They had class notes and they would take tests off the basis of class notes.  One or two would come in and make notes.  I think we did some note taking, but I went to every class.  I like it; that‘s the way I learn, listening and interacting with people.  So for the most part, I enjoyed it. It was another intellectual endeavor the first two years.  I learned a lot very quickly as we all did.   I learned some things that weren’t written in the book, like when you’re working with another classmate, you have got to do your side; everybody has to pull their weight.  There is no place for laziness in medicine.  There is no place for trying to get out of work.  We didn’t have a lot of people that did that; but if you did, it got around pretty quickly that you weren’t willing to do your bit of work.  The other thing that I learned is, I guess, to tell the truth.  It’s not that I didn’t know it, I guess, but it became imprinted on me with ole Dr. Abernathy, the female.  We were in a pediatric clinic when I was a general medical student.  I had gone in to see this African-American child who had asthma and I did the exam and came out to report to her.  She asked, “Did he have any adenopathy?” I didn’t even know what adenopathy was; but I said, “No, he didn’t have any adenopathy.” She didn’t say a word, very quiet and methodically we went in and she found a node in every conceivable place on this young man.  She didn’t say anything; but, I realized at that point, if you don’t know something in medicine you have to be honest.  It doesn’t work: for one, to not tell the truth; or two, to expand on the truth. It’s to say “Hey wait a minute, I’m not with you on this” and that served me the rest of my medical career and still does.”\n\nAny other outstanding memories of medical school? \n\n“Well as we progressed and got into the third and fourth years, it felt like we were getting into real medicine, not just academics.  Talking about looking a little bit further down the line, I felt like I wanted to do, it wasn’t called family practice then it was called general practice, and I \n\n\nwanted to do that primarily I think based on the experience I told you I had with Dr. Mobley and the respect  that I thought they had and I wanted to be a part of that.  One of our classmates, Bob Lawrence, came up to me and I guess we were in our senior year and he said, “I hear you want to do general practice.”  I said,” Yeah.” He said, “I do too.”  He said, “Do you want to be partners?” and I thought for a minute; Bob was a lot smarter than I was, he was intellectually ahead of me, so I kind of thought that was kind of an honor for him to make that proposal.  I thought for a minute and I said, “Yeah.”  So, he stuck out his hand and we shook on it.  That was kind of the way we made deals back then; no lawyers, no agreements, nothing signed, just a hand shake.  When I saw everything in clinical medicine; everything I wanted to do, I wanted to be a pediatrician, I wanted to be an obstetrician, I thought about surgery, I thought about internal medicine; so it seemed pretty logical to me afterwards, that I wanted to be in family medicine.  I wanted to deliver babies. I got to deliver several babies in medical school and I really did like it.  Bob stayed in Little Rock and did an internship over at St. Vincent’s and remember then, there were rotating internships and straight internships.  I just looked back over Kaduceus and what people were choosing, rotating or straight; so, I wanted to do a rotating and I knew that and I wanted to get as much experience  as I could.  John Peter Smith at Fort Worth came up and gave us a dinner, a very nice dinner at the Top of the Rock or someplace like that, and invited us to come to Fort Worth.  The payment for that year was $10,000.00.  That was about three or four thousand dollars more than any other than I knew of.  So, we went down, I did an interview, and decided I wanted to do that. Bob stayed in Little Rock and I went to Fort Worth.  Mary Ann and I were married.  We had a baby girl going with us that was delivered while we were in medical school.   I got to do a lot of stuff.  I delivered a lot of babies.  At that time, we were having epidemics of H-Flu meningitis, spinal taps on every child that came into the ER that had a fever or looked like they were sick.  One of my interns had adopted a child and she came in with a fever and he wanted me to see her.  He wanted me to see her.  I said, “ok” I was pretty honored to do that.  He said, “What do you think?” and I said, “I think we ought to get someone to do a spinal tap.”  He said, “I want you to do it.” I said, “I don’t know if I want to do that on your child.” He said,” I have seen you do a spinal tap and no one can do it better than you.”  That’s the kind of thing that makes it worthwhile.  So, I did.  It was atraumatic and no meningitis and we were happy.  Now to counter that, there was a five year- old African-American who came in and he was sick and a temperature and it was puss coming out.  I was horrified and scared; I walked out to get someone to get started on his antibiotics and she herniated her brain and died right there in front of me.  That’s the kind of thing you don’t forget. But Fort Worth, interesting place, the biggest place we ever lived in our life.  We remember those years.  That was when the air oil embargo was on.  You couldn’t buy gasoline; you had to line up.  There was no gasoline stations opened at night.  They closed at 5 o’clock; you had to get there to line up in your car to get enough gas to get to the hospital almost every day.  It was also hotter than hell in Fort Worth; so, I decided that I didn’t want to stay in Texas.”  \n\nHad you and Bob kept track?\n\n\n\n“We did and we made plans and just both of us do our internship.  We talked back in forth and we came to Arkansas to try to find a place where two family physicians could go in at the same time and make a living.  My sister who lived here in Jonesboro said, “Come to Jonesboro, they need doctors here.”  Ok, I have never been to Jonesboro, Arkansas in my whole life; I didn’t even know it existed.  But as I told you, we came the day after the tornado with our wives and we were received so well.  Rush Barrett was a drug rep, who was a friend of my sisters, and he took us around to every doctor, every what you call CEO now, and everybody said come.  We said, “We’re going to be two doctors.”  They said, “That’s fine, we need them.”  Ok; so, we decided to, we rented a building, we hired four people: two nurses and two people up front.  We didn’t know what to charge.  I told the office manager, “Why don’t you call around to these other doctor’s and see what they’re charging.”  She said, “I think that‘s against the law.”  I said, “Why don’t you disguise your voice and do it anyway.”  So, she did, and we did, and you may know that you charged like $10 or $12, it didn’t matter; there were no levels 1, 2, 3 or 4.  Everybody got charged the same thing.”                \n\nSo, where was your first office?\n\n“Right across the street from the hospital.  It was an old pharmacy and it was set up. We made it work.” \n\nWas it St. Barnard’s Hospital or Craighead Hospital?\n\n“St. Barnard’s Hospital.  Craighead Hospital hadn’t been built then.  So, we started out and we built the practice.  It resumed up like everybody said.  People would come and I’d say, “What’s wrong with you?” and they’d say, “Nothing, I just want you to be my doctor.” Ok, I thought, “Can I charge for that?”  After a while, I figured out that I could charge for it.  So, we had a lot of patients.  My partner, like I say was very smart, he made one concession for me and that was that I wanted to deliver babies.  We weren’t very well received by the obstetricians here; but, we pushed because there were still some family physicians delivering in Jonesboro and we delivered babies and as it grew and grew, we delivered more.  There was a time when women’s lib was making a break through.  There were women here that wanted to deliver without pain medicine. They wanted to do the Lamaze method and the other alternative was Scopolamine and Demerol, which takes momma out of the situation totally.  They would get that once they went into labor and they would wake up the next day and say, “What did I have?”  These women had a group and they taught Lamaze and the obstetricians for some reason didn’t want to delivery them under those circumstances.  I thought, “Fine with me.  I would be glad if you want to control your own pain and it works. That’s fine.” And it did, and we got to be known as the doctors who would take care of women that had Lamaze and we ended up with some of the very nicest people you could imagine delivering.  But, it grew and it grew.  We started here in 1974 and got very busy.  We were on call every other night.  We were busy during the day, busy on the weekend, and with time, I kind of burned out.  I think most doctors might put themselves in the situation where they are just working all the time.  I took a vacation.  My wife and I went \n\n\non a trip to Europe for two weeks and when I got back, my partner met me at the door and put his hand on his hips and said, “You’re never going anywhere for two weeks again.”  I thought, “Well, that’s kind of dictatorial; but, I totally understand.”  So, it became very busy and about that time, there was an entity called AHEC, Area Health Education Centers, and in Jonesboro, Ben Owens was the CEO at St. Barnard’s and he asked me one day, “What do you think about this? Go down to Little Rock and talk to these people.”  I had no experience in teaching.  This was in 1982.  So one of our colleagues, Mike Mackey, who was involved in AHEC at that time as the AHEC Director, called and said, “I want to talk to you guys on Sunday afternoon,” this was on Saturday, so I said, “OK.”  Somehow, I kinda knew what he wanted.  I was thinking he was going to ask us to be a part of that residency program.  So, we went over there and that was exactly what he wanted because John Williams, who had started the program, was leaving after a year and a half.  He said, “I want you to do this.”  Well, they were going to pay anything; they weren’t going to pay enough for us to do it.  So, we negotiated a deal that one of us will come in the morning and one of us will come in the afternoon and then we will have to go to our clinic to see patients to even out the money that you’re willing to pay us.  That became ok and I said, “But, we are going to have to have help on both sides, in our practice and in our teaching area,” which we have never done before, no training as teachers.  It so happened that a couple of guys that finished the program that year joined us and so, they did the same thing: they were a half a day in our clinic and a half a day in the teaching area.  So, we started, well we didn’t actually start the residency program, but pretty much carried it on from 1982 until now, I’m still involved in the residency program as a faculty member.”  I learned that there were not a lot of family medicine residency programs then.  Even at John Peter Smith, people didn’t stay much longer than two years.  But the year that we finished, we could have done a year of internship, then three years of practice, and then apply to be Board certified and so, we did.  I had no expertise in teaching; so, we had to kind of learn it as we went along.   We went to conferences and things like that.”\n\nHow many residents did you have to take?\n\n“We were taking four a year; so at the maximum, it would be twelve residents: one in each year.  In the first few years, we kind of waxed and waned; as far as people were interested in family medicine and then they weren’t; so, we would try to get four, four good people; we weren’t just scrapping the bottom of the barrel.  The least we had was one to graduate: one out of four to graduate; that happened a couple of times.  Then, we would have a plethora of people applying to be residents; so, we would kind of have our pick of the crowd.”\n\nWhere did your residents do their in hospital training? \n\n“Here, at St. Barnard’s.” \n\nHow were they accepted in those early days by the rest of the medical community?                   \n\n\n\n“Almost immediately as peers: Very willing to teach, hands on, delivering babies; there was a little bit of, I guess, competitive feeling or uncertainty by the OB’s that were here for the first few years.  Then, we had a new group of people who really wanted to teach and they picked up and said, “If you’re going to do OB, then you have to do C-Sections; so, they started training the residents to do C-Sections and everything kind of fell into place.  They have been respected and like I say treated as peers pretty much the whole time that we have been involved, or that we’ve been there, and I have been there pretty much the whole time.”\n\nSo, you are still doing the Ad Director?\n\n“I’m not the director, Scott Dickson, is the director now.  I did it for 28 years.”\n\nThat’s a long time.\n\n“It is a long time.”\n\nSo, what did you do or how did you balance being in private practice and being a director as that went forward.  I could see you had set up a situation at the beginning.\n\n“I did that until the year 2000.  In my brain, the way I worked it out, I thought that my private practice would amplify my ability to be a teacher.  The need grew both in our practice and in the residency for teachers; so, we were able at times to pick people to come into the residency teaching and to be in my practice too.  Dr. Lawrence and I had divided our practice up after a couple of years and he was also getting residents coming from our program to be in his group; so, it was a mix and match.  Sometimes we would have people that would work in the residency for a while and then say, “Well, I want to go into full time private practice” and we would do that.  It was very hard to get people to be full time faculty because UAMS wouldn’t pay enough or they couldn’t pay enough.  Then, we kind of got that PACE scale increased and some other things happened and I decided that I could, if they could offer more money, and I could be full time in the year 2000.  Now, we have still some part time faculty.  We have two, three, part time faculty and then about six full time faculties including a PharmD.”\n\nIn what year did you stop being the director?\n\n“Let’s see, I did it from 1982 plus 28 years.”\n\nSo, around 2000?\n\n“Right around there, it was probably a little later than that. It’s going on I think about seven years since I have not been the residency director.”\n\nSo, when did you quit doing OB?  \n\n“I haven’t quit.” \n\nOh, you’re still doing OB.   \n\n\nLet’s talk a little bit about the evolution of care in this part of the state especially and also I would like to hear your comment about anything  that you look out when you go to other parts of the state, like Little Rock, or other parts of the state, anything’s that are unique about Jonesboro area, or this part of the Northern Delta, that might not be true say in the Southern Delta or in the mountains.  \n\n“Well, I don’t know that I am able to delineate much difference.  I have been involved state wide in the Arkansas Medial Society and the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians for years meeting with them in Little Rock and you get a pretty good feel for what’s happening across the state and also going to the National AMA and the American Academy of family Physicians, meetings.  I have been involved in that.  You always learn a little bit about what’s happening.  I think initially the doctors did everything.  They didn’t have MA Scribe and obviously, we didn’t have computers.  We didn’t have people kind of telling us what their expectations of us were.  We just lived up to our own expectations.”\n\nDid that make things better or worse?\n\n“Well, I guess that depends on who you talk to.  Most physicians are independent enough to think that their way is the best way and I think I still like to think that.  The physician should be, I think, in charge of the medical team and that means to me that you’re in charge.  It does not mean that you’re in a committee in charge; but, what you want is not just a suggestion, it becomes a reality.  That has changed.  That has changed in that now you have to ask, “Can I have this? Can I have this new piece of equipment?”  Well, before you just got it.  “Can I have this person?  We need another nurse or we need another doctor,” or “We need this.” We will get it.  In private practice, you had to make room for it.  You had to maybe subsidize a new partner for six months to a year. So, there was a lot of collegiality when it first started.  The County Medical Society met every month and there was no question, you were going to go there.  When we came to Jonesboro, Bob and his wife and Mary Ann and I were invited to people’s houses.  They had dinners for us to make us happy and let us know that they were happy for us to come.  Flowers were sent to the house. It was like, “You’re very special and we’re glad you are here.”  Now, it’s kind of like, “Alright, we can pay you this much”, “Well, I need a little more”, “Ok, we can pay you that, maybe, but you’re going to have to work harder and everything is going to be dependent on the number of patients that you see or the amount of revenue you generate if you’re going to be in our group.”  Someone else is paying you.  It, a lot of times, leads to irritation in our age group, as I think the younger people are compensating for that with not working as hard as we did; like every other night and I would not wish that on anybody, I wouldn’t want to go back to that ever.  I don’t have any hesitation to say that they’re wrong by not taking call at all, or not having prolonged hours at all, or not going to the hospital at all.  We are still doing all of that in our residency group and we are doing it kind of like we used to do it, but what are graduating are people who will probably not do it that way.”\n\n\n\nTalk about the type of residents that were coming in when you first started doing the residency and the type of residents now: the way they’re trained, their hands-on abilities by the time they get to you.                     \n\n“Well, I guess as a junior medical student I delivered ten or twelve babies and a senior medical student taught me how to apply forceps and deliver a baby with forceps, which I did as an intern and which I did for many years in private practice.  I don’t do it now; I don’t like it and realize that that is probably not the best way to do it. So, we’re not training people to do that particular type of delivery.  We’re, in particularly in OB, doing a lot of C-Sections and that was pretty rare to do a C-Section.”\n\nIn place of using forceps?\n\n“Well that and breech delivers were breech deliveries, ok.  They weren’t an automatic C-Section.  So, that’s an example.  When carried a little bit further, I really didn’t want too many people in the Intensive Care Units.  When we started, there was an Intensive Care Unit at St. Barnards with four beds and they were so proud of that.  There were no hospitalists, no intensivists, no pulmonologists, no cardiologists, it was just us.  To say that I want to go back to that, “No, I wouldn’t want to go back to that at all.”  I think that with more people you have a little less responsibility.  You are able to share the burden of extremely sick people and I don’t think that that’s bad. But, it is different.”  \n\nTell me what you thought your life would be like when you first got out of training and what do you think the future of medicine holds.\n\n“First of all, I was pretty naive, ok.  I didn’t have an idea as what it was going to be.  It was all a new ball of wax.  Like I said, we didn’t know that we were going to be able to make it.  For that first year, I made $60,000 for one-half a year and I thought, “What am I going to do with all this money?” I never had all this money. So, it’s light years to where we are now.  Is it going to be better or worse for doctors?  I think as far as their time, as far as their family, and to lessen the possibly of burn-out or suicide; the younger people are expecting and demanding to not be on call and to not be 24-7 available for patient care.  I’m hoping and I think that their mental health is going to be better. I still think that they want to do a good job; they want to be good doctors; and they want to take good care of their patients; and that’s where we all started.”\n\nWhat has been the most gratifying part of medicine for you?\n\n“I enjoyed delivering babies.  I enjoyed the smile after the baby is delivered, the patient and the family thanking me, and me holding the baby. Or when the baby is three or four years old and they come in and they want me to hug them and want me to take care of them.  For older patients to say, “I don’t want to see anybody, but you. You’re the only one that knows what’s wrong with me and how to treat me.” That’s gratifying, not true; but it’s the confidence and the love that the patients have for you is just what I set out to achieve.  Those doctors I wanted to be like.”\n\n\nSo, what parts of medicine worry you the most?\n\n“Well, I think the expectation to see numbers and then the realization that you can’t get all those numbers in a day, seeing thirty five patients a day; that used to be kind of the standard, it might be more for some people or less for some people but that was about what I would try to see.  To do that, to put everything in the computer, everything the way it is supposed to be done, the way other people want it done, all that is for some people almost impossible.  Then I look at my residence and see them typing fast on the keyboard; they may be able to do it. But, if I had to do it and see that many people, I would have MA Scribe, I would use what I think the best thing that I have and that is my experience and my intuitive nature as to whether someone was sick or whether someone would need a CT-Scan or a pat on the back.  That’s where I think our strength is.”\n\nDo you have children?\n\n“We have two daughters; the one that lives next door and her sister lives in Atlanta.” \n\nEither of them physicians?\n\n“No. My oldest daughter went to school at Hendrix.”\n\nThe family tradition.\n\n“Yeah, but she had no interest in medicine.  She went and got her Masters in Urban Planning; so, she went down to Destin and worked there. They needed some Urban Planning.  She met a young man; she had work in Atlanta for FEMA during her time there getting her Masters and liked FEMA; and so, he liked FEMA. They both worked for FEMA and got married and had two kids; my grandson and granddaughter.  Then my youngest daughter is still in Atlanta.  She married a man who is in construction and she is an artist.  I have some of her work here, there, over there, and over there.”\n\nHow did your family adapt to all these extended hours and all this time and all the worry?  At one time, you used the word, “Almost burned out.” How did your family adapt to all this?\n\n“Well, of course, you would have to ask them, but it was hard.  My wife is very remarkable and I’m not just saying that because she is in ear shot, but she has been very supportive of anything that I wanted to do.  I, like a lot of physicians, decided to make some investments; some of which put our financial life in real strain for several years.  I thought the answer to that would be to just work harder, increase cash flow, and I couldn’t catch up with it.  I couldn’t catch up with it and I was very frustrated.  I was talking to her about it and she said to me, “I love you no matter what you do. If we have to declare bankruptcy, we can do that.  You don’t have to be a doctor.  I will always be with you.”  I knew she loved me; but at that time, I knew she really loved me and that she meant it.  Fortunately, we hung on and what saved my life as far as burn-out was to get those first two graduates to come into our private practice and work with us.  It \n\n\nmeant from being on call every other night to every fourth night.  But, my girls have always been understanding.  I’ve tried real hard to be at the major things like softball games.  We did miss a pageant once.  We were actually on a trip, my wife and I to Europe, and one of our girls won the pageant.  I hated to miss it and I don’t think they will ever let us live that down; but that’s ok.”\n\nHave you approached the thought of retiring or slowing down?\n\n“I’m 68, the only people that I know that add a half to their years are kids that are in the first grade and my mother as she got older; so, she would say that she was 72 ½.  I think about that.  I’m 68 and passed a half; almost 69, ok.  I’ve always thought that I might work until I’m 72 in the job I’m doing and I don’t know maybe do something else.  Mary Ann has threatened me with my life because even though there are a lot of things that could be done around here and I like working in the yard and doing things like that, I think I will be bored.”\n\nWhat do you do for hobbies?  What are you other interests?\n\n“Well, I hunt.  My dad took me hunting in Morrilton, primarily it was quail; we always had dogs.  I’ve always had a dog and I always had a cat.  I came to Jonesboro and tried to quail hunt and actually found some farmers who knew where some quail where.  I had some Brittany spaniels, several golden retrievers, and then finally moved on to a chocolate lab now; he’s easier to take care of.”\n\nDo you fish at all?\n\n“You know, I’m not a big fisherman.  I get joy out of both the grandsons have come and their dad showed them, they’re six and five, the little pond that’s stocked there and they both have caught fish by themselves and reeled them in.  I mean not big bass; but that was enjoyable to watch them catch fish and help them”.                            \n\nOne other question about your practice, has the practices in Jonesboro been intergraded into the hospitals?  Are all the clinics now part of the hospital entity or oriented with someone or someway?  \n\n“Yes, all of them; except us.”\n\nBut, you’re not?\n\n“We are not owned by the hospital.” \n\nAre there hospitalist?\n\n“Yes”\n\n\nSo, do you all still round on your own patients?\n\n“We do, but we are the only ones.  Well, there may be one group of internal medicine doctors who still see people in the hospital, but no family physicians in any of the hospitals.” \n\nSome of the internist even doesn’t round on their patients.\n\n“That’s true.      \n\nSo, it’s a changing world.\n\n“It is. It is a changing world; but see, it could be considered a better world because you’re really not on call anymore.  The people who need the care are the people in the hospital.  The urgent care sometimes stay open until 7 or 8 o’clock at night and are available on the weekends; so, patients don’t call you as much anymore.  Even if you are on call, you don’t have to go in unless you’re delivering babies; but, there are no family physicians delivering babies except us.”\n\nSo if a new resident came in with you all, they would be expected to round and deliver babies?\n\n“A new faculty member yes; that’s what makes it harder to recruit new faculty members, because it is a lot of responsibility.”\n\nWell, Joe, there is a whole lot of other questions we could ask you; but I got one question I want to ask you and then we will end the questions.\n\n“Ok.”        \n\nJust pretend that we are not here, we are going to give you a copy of this interview.  Just image that sitting over here was one of your great, great, grandchildren, what would you want to say to them?  \n\n“I had a good full life and I hope that you will have the same.” \n\nThank you, sir. Thank you very much.  This was great.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161596/file/293432#t=0.0,5077.69763"}]}]}]}