{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/599z030643/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Dennis Yelvington"]},"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.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2022-05-09 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["video"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Arkansas","family doctors","rural family medicine","physicians","Covid-19","electronic medical records","telehealth","telemedicine"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["English (corporate 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.\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/000/196/876/small/Yelvington_Dennis%285-9-2022%29.mp4_1689102775.jpg?1689102776","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Yelvington__Dennis_(5-9-2022).mp4"]},"duration":5663.3577,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/196/876/small/Yelvington_Dennis%285-9-2022%29.mp4_1689102775.jpg?1689102776","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/196/876/original/Yelvington__Dennis_%285-9-2022%29.mp4?1689102755","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":5663.3577,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876/transcript/45036","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Transcript of Dr. Dennis Yelvington interview [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876/transcript/45036/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Dr. Sam Taggart: \n\nGood afternoon, my name is Sam Taggart and I am in the office of Dr. Dennis Yelvington of Stuttgart, Arkansas and we are doing this interview for the Arkansas Physicians Oral History Project for the book, “For Every Family, a Family Doctor” about the history of modern family medicine in Arkansas and specifically about the Academy of Family Physicians in Arkansas and its history over the last 75 years.   \n\nNow, we are going to tell the story in the book...well, I already; the book is pretty well already written...through the lives of the physicians who have done the practice.  I’m doing 10 for each 15-20 year segments and you are one of the ten for the 2000-2020 segment.\n\nMy feeling is...and I think this is correct...is that the best place to start with all of this is at the beginning: When and where were you born?  Talk about the circumstances of your birth....who delivered you if you know....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI was born October 25, 1953.  I grew up; my mother and father lived in Clarendon, Arkansas in Monroe County and at that time, we had aunts and uncles who lived in Memphis.  We didn’t really have anybody who delivered babies in Clarendon, so my mother went and stayed with my aunt and uncle in Memphis; so, I was born at the Methodist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee by Dr. Taylor.....that’s all I know, Dr. Taylor.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo tell me a little bit about your parents; who were they, what were their names, when were they born?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nDad was A.E. Yelvington born in ‘24 and mother was Helen Coffield-Yevlington born in ‘27.  Dad was from Clarendon and mom was from Clarendon.  Mom was a homemaker and dad was a cotton farmer.  Grandfather Yelvington was a cotton farmer and I suspect he family before them were cotton farmers.  They all migrated from the east coast through the south I the late 1800s and early 1900s.    \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat nationality is the name Yelvington?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIt’s English...Tonus town...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you know about how they migrated across the pond?\n\n \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...no, I really don’t know that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nClarendon, of course, is close to Holly Grove...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nUh huh...yeah....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI should wait, but I want to; because I’ll forget about it.....did you have any contact when you were growing up or know anything about Dr. Herd Stone?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...Herd was...when I got out of medical school, I went and worked for Herd.  He went on vacation for a week and simply called me up and said, “Dennis, I need somebody to work. I’m leaving town and I want you to see all my patients.”  I hadn’t even graduated yet.  Back then when you got out of your last rotations in April or...at that time, I think it was April....you hadn’t graduated yet, but you could still practice back then. So, I went to Holly Grove, met him at the clinic, and he introduced me to his nurse; Ms Willow Lambert.  He said, “The clinic is yours” and I said, “Well, what do I do?” (Laughing).....He said in his gruff voice, “Well, you just do what you’ve been taught to do, boy” and he left. (Laughing)....So, I saw patients; fortunately, it wasn’t a whole lot...might’ve been 20-30 patients a day...and most of them were common stuff, but he had all his medical records in a 5x8 metal index card holder.  That was the medical record; he would write down the date and pretty much what diagnosis they had before: runny nose, sore throat, infection, and what he gave.  A lot of times, it was just one line on that 5x8 card; so, I had something to go by.  Plus, his nurse knew all his patient’s history, what was wrong with them, and told me what to do; but, I was scared to death.  \n\n(Both laughing)....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI have a funny story on Herd; back in his younger days.....this was when Dr. Northcutt, one of my partners here....they were good friends; Carl Northcutt was a doctor here for years.  Anyway, Herd never would admit to it, but he told a story that Dr. Stone would deliver babies back then; I don’t know how many babies that he delivered in South Monroe County, but a lot.  He got a call one night to go out to the country to deliver this baby and he thought it was a little unusual.  It was late at night, after midnight, and so, he got out in his old car and drove down...it was down, of course, a gravel road and then down a dirt road to some backwoods; the bottom lands.  He said that he knew this family, but he had never been out in the area and he had this suspicion though that something might not be right.  As he was driving around this curvy road through dark woods back there, he turned a curve and there was a tree that had fallen out in the middle of the road and knew immediately that something was wrong. So, he had his hand on his pistol while he was driving, he always carried a pistol in his bag, and he said that he turned, looked, saw someone coming out of the woods, and just turned and shot through is door a couple of times.  He didn’t hit him, it just scared him to death; he put his car in reverse and got out of there in a hurry....but, I will never forget that story; it was funny.\n\n(Both laughing).....         \n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo, you were born and raised in Clarendon....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nClarendon is about the size of Augusta; a couple thousand of people...or it was at that time, I don’t know what it is now.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nSmaller...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nTell me a little bit about it and do you have brothers and sisters?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI have one sister who is two years younger than me and we were born the exact same day.  We both share our birthdays....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat are the odds of that....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThey’d make one half of the cake blue and the other half of the cake pink.  I was jealous and didn’t like her at my birthday party.  She still lives in Clarendon and works in the courthouse for the county.  I see her on Wednesdays when I go to my clinic there in Clarendon.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nTell me a little bit about your childhood before school and growing up as a little kid in Clarendon.  This would’ve been in the 1950s...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, well......so, we grew up on a cotton farm five miles out of town between Clarendon and Brinkley; called “Military Road.”  It was mainly dirt with a little bit of gravel here and there until you got into town.  I remember as a kid we’d play out in the irrigation wells out in the summer.... when I was 5, 6, or 7 years old.  We’d run down the cotton rows and throw cotton bowls at one-another.  As I got a little older and the cotton-pickers would come in, our job as a kid was when they put the cotton in the cotton trailer, we were to stomp the cotton down so that they could put more cotton in to have a bigger load.  So, that was our job; to stomp cotton... of course, we had more time playing and digging tunnels thought the cotton trailers and whatnot.  We did have a cotton picker catch on fire; that was an exciting day on the farm.  My dad died in a car accident when I was 7...he had been quail hunting in Blackton, Arkansas... and so after that, we moved to town and left the farm..\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat did your mom do again?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nShe was a homemaker.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat did she do after that?\n\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, she eventually remarried a few years later to Sidney Miller and I consider him my father; he raised us and never had children of his own...so......\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you have a large extended family?  You said your grandparents were cotton farmers. \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, all the..... Well I think I’m the last Yelvington in the county; but there were a lot of Yelvingtons in Holly Grove and Clarendon that had moved in Phillips County.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI saw it recently...a friend of mine is doing the history of Clarendon; he is the librarian and another friend is a good historian.....but anyway, they were going through some records from the school from 1931 and I did not know that there was a Yelvington Blacksmith Shop; two brothers...J.T. and George Yelvington in Clarendon at that time.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThey were your relatives....obviously....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, they were relatives; I haven’t even explored it yet as this was just last week.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you remember anything about school in Clarendon?  Going to school, especially elementary school, people who were significant to you... teachers, preachers, family members, grandparents....? \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, our local doctor in town was Dr. Joseph Pupsta.  I believe Dr. Pupsta was from Massachusetts, if I’m not mistaken.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThat’s an interesting name.....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah... Dr. Pupsta was a pipe smoking somewhat blunt... (Laughing)....physician as I guess most of the country doctors might’ve been back then.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah..\n\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nAnyway, he lived next door to us at one time; he had gotten a divorce.  We lived in like a triplex apartment complex, which my grandfather owned, but he lived in the middle apartment and had a motorcycle.  Not many people had a motorcycle with a side-car back in the ‘50s, but I can remember him putting me in that motorcycle and riding me around in the yard and in the neighborhood with that motorcycle.  Of course, my mom admired him as being a physician; she used to tell the story of when I was just a kid out on the farm, I was maybe 3 or 4 years old, I had a high fever of 104 and very sick and she didn’t know what to do, so she called Dr. Pupsta and he drove 5 miles out in the country on a gravel road to see and gave me a shot.  I, of course, got better but she claims he saved my life when I was a child from that. But, he was instrumental in my making the decision of going into medicine.  Actually during school, I started out in architectural school; from 10th, 11th, 12th grade, I wanted to be an architect.  So when we chose to go to college, there was only one architectural school in the state in Fayetteville; so, that’s why I went to Fayetteville.  But after two-and-a-half years in architectural school, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do and so, I changed.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen you were a kid, did you work?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, mowing yards a little bit; not much.  Clarendon was a typical delta town and was pretty populated back then with 2,564; I always had that population sign memorized in my head when \n\nI would come in from college.  But, it was a thriving little town with a main street, a stop light...which they still have the stop light...I have a shop, or a hunting club, over there and we still have the stop light.  It was full of athletics; we have the Holly Grove-Clarendon football game every Thanksgiving that drawls thousands of people to the game.  We have a thriving civic community. We had boy scouts growing up as well as church activities.  It was fun; we were sheltered somewhat.  We played in the street, rode our bicycle like we see... on social media, I sometimes see on Facebook pages “the silver elephant” talking about....they know how old I am, I guess, and so they kind of hit me with things like that... you know, the days of the mosquito truck coming through and fogging the city with all the kids getting behind it and playing ghosts coming in and out of the fog.  It was fun.  You know, riding your bike until dark; late and mom not worrying about you...you might be 3-4 blocks away.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou mentioned the doctor that you had and Dr. Herd....were there any other people: grandparents, teachers, preachers....who had a big impact on you in terms of...not directing you...but coaxing you in one direction or another?\n\n Dr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...well, I had a science teacher, Ms. Marian Barber, that taught us science in 10th and 11th grade....I really enjoyed that; she kind of encouraged me and inspired me to be more and do better in science.  I didn’t like English.  I liked history a little bit, but I really didn’t like English.  But, she was sort of a mentor; not specifically for medicine, but just in the science field.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat about the interest for architecture; where did it come from?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I like to design things; mainly, it was the design portion: the engineering and the mathematics.  The other part, I did not like; because, I don’t know...architects at that time were in Vol Walker Library in Fayetteville, which was a close nit group, and they were....I want to say, ultra-liberal and I grew up in a conservative east Arkansas town.  So, I had different thoughts about things than they did.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...Was your family religious?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...yes, Christian....Protestant; Assembly of God Church when I was growing up and of course when I got married, I became Methodist. (Both laughing) As most people do...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWas your wife originally from Clarendon?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, she.....I didn’t get married until I was 40.  She was a nurse at the hospital, she had been divorced, and had two children. So, we got married 29 years ago and have two children now.... one is 25 and the other is 19 now; we just went down to Mississippi Sate to start on Saturday to load her up from her freshman year and bring her stuff back....she’s still there.\n\n(Laughing)...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nIn a town of 2,000, you’re going to have classes of 30, 40, or 50 kids... \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n60 in our class...\n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you have good close friends from those groups?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes; in fact, my closest friends are still my high school friends.  We have....I go to Clarendon for a clinic on Wednesday, Wednesday morning; I’m on call Tuesday night and then go to Clarendon on Wednesday...so, we have one restaurant in Clarendon; we used to have a couple, but now  there is only one...but, we’ll meet there for lunch; my old high school friends.  One is the Mayor, another one is an attorney there, one is the librarian...my friend, one of my good friends was an architect, so.....he’s retired now and taught school also, but he lives in Clarendon and so, we met.  My dad is still living and so, we meet at the restaurant and tell old stories.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHow about your mom?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nShe passed away...I think it was in probably ’05.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nNow you mentioned that sports were a big deal in Holly Grove, were you active in sports?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I was small for my age, but did play basketball up until 8th grade when they all grew more than I did.  I played football as a senior; Coach Buddy Harding was our coach.  I don’t know if you know Rush Harding in Little Rock?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI remember the name....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, that was his father; he was our English teacher and our football coach.  He was really good.  I enjoyed football; I played center and nose guard; I wasn’t very big...of course, none of us were very big at that time.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHow big were you?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nAbout 145 pounds..... (Laughing)...... \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, I played guard at 154.....yeah, right.... \n\n(Both laughing)\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThat’s right...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI’m from Augusta....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOh really...Oh, let me tell ya....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI’m originally from August...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWe might’ve played you in football.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nNot while I was playing; I think y’all started playing Augusta within a few years after I graduated high school.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIn ’70, Augusta was our first game and it was a hot summer. It was very hot; we went to Augusta to play and I was a center....the very first play, we did our warm up and it was a night game; but the humidity was just unbelievable and the heat was stifling......but anyway, I bent over to center the ball and both legs cramped.  (Laughing).....They both cramped, I fell back, and got a penalty for moving the ball.  They had to carry me off and give me some....back then, of course you probably had the same thing...the coach made pickle juice with salt in it an all kinds of stuff...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nRight...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nBut finally after the first ____, I got to go back in...but that’s my memory of the Augusta game, which we lost by the way.\n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you enjoy school?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI enjoyed school; yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWould you call yourself a tinker-er? You said that you liked to build things….\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I like to design....I like the idea of designing things; I wasn’t much of a builder.  I like to think about it.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWere you a good student?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, I was a pretty good student; not the top of the class, but I think I was 4th or 5th.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen you got around to thinking about where you were going to go to school...you said there was only one architectural school in Arkansas and so that was where you were going to go ....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, there was no choice at that time.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you remember any other things that pushed you in one direction or the other?  Any crises in your family...your father dying has got to be one significant crisis....\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, I can remember when my dad’s friend came to the house to tell my mother that he was in the hospital in Brinkley; they had taken him there where he eventually died that night.  But that was a deep memory and I can remember coming home after about two-and-a-half years in architectural school...that winter and telling my mother, “I just don’t think I want to an architect”....plus it was going to take six years; it was a five year bachelors degree, but normally it took people six years to get through it.  I said, “I just don’t want to go to school that long” and she said, “What do you think about being a doctor?” and I thought, “Well, you know, I like Dr. Pupsta; that’s a good idea.  I think I will do that; I think I will change.” So, the end of my junior year and senior year is when I changed.\n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHad you had any of the courses that you would have to have?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo.  \n\n(Both Laughing)....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo, this extended your life a little bit....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThat was a problem; yes.  (Laughing)....Back then, there were certain courses that you were required to take...a lot of the science classes, chemistry, and whatnot...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nEspecially organic....yeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah and of course, I had to take the MCAT...which I wasn’t prepared to do very well at that time; so, I did not get in the first year that I applied to medical school.  So, then I went and thought, “Well, I’ll teach.”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWere they still doing that where you could get into medical school after 90 hours without a degree?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI think they had just started that maybe; perhaps. I think at that time it was more that you tended to have a degree; most of them did.  Anyway, I went to graduate school at UAMS in physiology and biophysics and got a Masters degree there.  I was competing with a lot of the kids that were in their first year of sophomore.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen did you graduate from college....well, when did you graduate from high school first?\n\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOk, ’71 was high school and ’74....no, ’75 was college....then, I went to graduate school at UAMS and, I guess, graduated from there in ’81.   No, I’m sorry; I graduated from medical school in ’82 and so, it was four years before that....so ’78.  Anyway, we were competing with a lot of the....well all of the medical students in physiology and biophysics and all that...and did well compared with them; so, I thought, “Well, I think I can do this again.”  At that time, they had some losses in the class; so, I talked to this professor......there weren’t that many people who had gone from graduate school to medical school, or they kind of frowned on it a little bit... but he said, “There will be some opening; so if you want to maybe get one of those openings, it would be better if you went somewhere else” and so, I did.  I went to an osteopathic school for a year, 9 months, and while I was there, I applied back to UAMS for a position....\n\n      \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhere did you go to osteopathic school?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nKansas City....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you like that?  Did you enjoy the school?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nUh, yeah....I enjoyed the science part of it, the study, and the camaraderie; but I did not like Kansas City.  Although, I have been back to visit numerous times and like it now; my mother-in-law is from there. But anyway, an opening came up in the sophomore class and so, I transferred back and it counted; I was so surprised.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat year did you star in the sophomore class?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nSophomore class ...in ’83....no, not....excuse me that would be ’79...’79 when I started my sophomore class.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou are just a little bit ahead of my wife.  My wife is Annette Enderlin; she is an ophthalmologist.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, Enderlin; yeah...I didn’t know that was your wife...that’s interesting.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, she’s about...I think, four years behind you.  She’d be four years behind you; that’s what it is.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI graduated in ’82 from medical school and so, she graduated in ’78?\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nNo, she started medical school...that’s right, I remember in about ’83....  \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOk, yeah....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nIt was right after we got .....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI remember her; oh yeah, I know the name.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo, tell me about the year of osteopathy and the first years of medical school; the years where you just grinded through...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...yeah, it was...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nFor most people...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, it wasn’t just like what most doctors did with the studying and the hours devoted...I remember coming home for Christmas for a few weekends and my friends were all doing \n\nexciting things, traveling to places, having fun, new cars, and everything....Of course, I was studying...literally sometimes 50-60 hours a week.  I had a scheduled where I would get 26 hours out of the day by setting my watch an hour ahead to get up and study...that was my alarm clock...and my wrist watch was the true time of day so that I could make classes...and then, the clock I used for studying was an hour later so that I could try to get 26 hours in a day. (Laughing)....  \n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWere there any teachers from college in those first two years that had a big impact on you? Again, it doesn’t have to be medical school; it could be grandparents, business people, other doctors.... \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, Dr. Pupsta was the only medical doctor that we knew at the time...but all my family supported me and they thought that was a great idea. My aunt, practically in New Jersey; my mother’s sister, she did well in school and encouraged me.  She called me frequently and couldn’t hear thunder, but she did all the talking on the phone. (Laughing) She’d always pray for me and say, “I know you’re going to do fine.”  Of course, my grandmother too; my grandfather had already passed away and so, I didn’t really have a grandfather at that time except for a step-grandfather...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you work at all during this time frame?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nUh, no; not during the first year of medical school...more like actually none through medical school.  When I was in graduate school, I worked as a graduate assistant in the department of physiology.  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you get to do any of the.....do you know Shot Rodgers history?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...yes...Shot...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHe did basically the same kind of thing...he went to graduate school at UAMS for several years before he ...and he ended up teaching some of the medical school classes....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, that’s right...” (laughing)......\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\n…Before he went to medical school…\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah.....I had a job teaching the nurses _______ in physiology during that time, which was interesting; it was girls from Stuttgart that I became friends with.  Dr. Northcutt’s daughter as a matter of fact, one of my partners eventually.  Of course, I did a research assistant with Dr. Ron Grimmel in the physiology department and my job....of course, I was just learning...but, I would \n\nprocure the animals from the...they kept the animals in the; what building was that on the eastside....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nBarton?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, it wasn’t Barton...it was there on campus; they had a place in Reecer drive....I don’t think it’s there anymore; they tore that building down years ago...but anyway, I would go and get the cats from there; I had to wear welder’s gloves, they were wild cats, and then we would prepare them and do research all night long.  We’d start that morning and we wouldn’t finish for 24 hours doing research on neurotransmitters, mapping brain pathways, and whatnot...that was interesting.  We had to make our own little 3-micron _____ for the electrodes.  Dr. Grimmel was a...he had a PHD in physiology and biochemistry and then had another PHD from Princeton in physics; a very intelligent man.\n\n         \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWere they good teachers?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes, they were good teachers....he was so far over my head though...(Laughing)...he was so smart, I could not keep up.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen I was going through, which was about 12-14 years before you went through, they were having a big argument about which physiology textbook to use...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nHuh....I don’t remember that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThe academics wanted us to use some kind of ...and the practical people wanted us to use “Guidance.”\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, Guidance...yeah, I remember that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nGuidance won out...that’s what we got tested on.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat kind of degree did you end up with in college?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nA bachelors of science and zoology...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAt some point during life, we all start getting socially active....at what point did you start doing that?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I guess, it was basically when I was in residency.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou’re a pretty serious fellow...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, you know, I wasn’t the smartest and so, I was always...mother and aunt always told me that I have to work harder.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nRight...\n\n(Both laughing)\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nBut really in my residency... I went to residency in family medicine; I always wanted to go back and practice in a small town, so I really didn’t have any desire to do anything else...so, I did my residency in Jonesboro at the AHEC there and those were three of the best years of my life with Dr. Stallings, the director there...he was just a fine man.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nJoe made that program there; I think….\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes, he did.  As a matter of fact, I think I was the third class that he had and in the class before, there was only one physician.  I think there were four in the inaugural class and four in our class.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nJoe was a classmate of mine.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOh, Joe is.....yeah, he is a fine...fine...fine...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou know, he is sick...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, I didn’t...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHe has Alzheimer’s disease.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I knew that was beginning.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nAnd Mike Moody, his good friend, passed away a few years ago...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nMike was a classmate of mine; well, Mike was a year ahead of us....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThose were my mentors in family medicine.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI’ve heard a number of people who I have interviewed about Joe call him “Papa Joe”....\n\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...yeah...we would go hunting together; he and I would go to Kansas...one of the drug reps had a farm over there and we would go pheasant hunting there....we went duck hunting all the time in Jonesboro over at his place and he would come here to Stuttgart and we’d go hunting over in Clarendon near the White River; he was a good guy.  We went pheasant hunting one time.... back then, it was legal in Kansas to shoot pheasants out of a vehicle...so, it was he and I and Dave Kohen, the pharmaceutical rep who still lives in Kansas...the south-west corner of Kansas, but anyway....Joe had a large sized Bronco, I believe, and we’d have our guns in the vehicle and Dave told us to just drive down this country road so that if we see a pheasant, we \n\ncan slow down and you could just shoot it out of the vehicle....slow down to a certain speed and it’s legal; they’re not going to catch you for that...I don’t think its legal now...but anyway, we’d drive by, they took turns, and Joe shot a pheasant.  We drove down the road, picked it up, and put in the back of the truck and then, Dave shot one.  I was in the back seat at this time; they rotated and when it got to be my turn, I’m sitting in the passenger seat with Joe driving...we see a pheasant and I said, “Ok, slow down” and so, I get my gun and about to shoot the pheasant and all the sudden the truck speeds up.  I mean, we were going like 10 miles an hour to all the sudden like 20, 30, 40 miles an hour...I said, “Joe, wait a minute....wait a minute, I can’t shoot” and all the sudden I hear...boom...boom... out of the driver’s side.  He’s driving with one hand and shooting a pheasant with the other one.\n\n(Both laughing).....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOh, it was fun and then, we put them in the back of the Bronco and we’re driving along when all the sudden one of them comes to life....you know, a pheasant will just flutter up in the air...well, it flutters up inside the truck and was flying around inside the truck with blood everywhere; I will never forget that.  I was screaming and Joe said, “shut up...shut up.”  But, he was a good guy; he really was.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nTalk a little bit about the process of where you were going to go do your training....you were going to go into family practice.  We really didn’t talk about the second two years, the clinical years; did you enjoy those? \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThe clinical years....uh yeah, that was pretty rigorous; but, I did enjoy it especially the senior year when we had our rotations.  I did AI at Children’s; that was fun and I got a little more responsibility.  We had...on the surgery rotation, it was a tough one...it was back during the Iranian hostage crises and of course, we’d have our little pods...I think I was a junior at that time and we had our little pods together and we’d round.  I ‘m trying to think of who my senior resident was right now....I’m trying to think of who our attending was; a tall man with glasses, real stern, and wore a suit everyday...gosh, I was trying to think of that the other day and I can’t remember....anyway Dr. Caldwell, I believe, was chairman of the department back then.  So anyway, I was in charge of the list of the patients that we were to see every day and so, it was kind of boring...”Ms. So-and-So...age...has pancreatitis or whatnot” and so on the back, I started writing a little spoof on the Iranian hostage crisis and someone called it “the surgery resident crisis.” Every time we’d have something in the news, I would...I called our attending, “the Attala”...it was Dr. Caldwell...”Attala”....Anyway, I wrote a nice thing and it got longer and longer and more detailed everyday about the surgery hostage crisis.  Anyway, somehow it got back to the attending...I had been doing this for like a month; it was a month rotation and this was at the end of it...so, I got called to the chairman’s office.  I just knew I was going to get kicked out of school; it was just terrible. My memory is that I walked into this huge office and there was this secretary sitting there and she doesn’t even look up for a few minutes.  I’m \n\nstanding there, like this, and clearing my throat an she finally looks up and says, “Oh, yes; we’re expecting you.”  (Laughing)  I knew I was in trouble then and so, she made me sit and wait forever and then says, “Ok, we’re ready for you.”  She opens the interior door to his office and it was like a movie; all I could see was darkness and this man sitting at a desk with a light behind him.  The whole room was dark and it was like a mile to his desk with a chair sitting in front of it; it took me forever to get up there and sit down.  He was sitting there with his head down flashing papers...the papers where I had written the patient lists...he goes through them and says, “Mr. Yelvington, did you write all these?“ and I said, “yes sir, I wrote them.”  He said, “Very interesting” and when he gets to the bottom, he slaps his desk and says, “That’s the funniest stuff that I’ve read in a long time.\n\n(Both laughing)....\n\nI didn’t know what to think and he said, “Listen, just don’t do it again; go have fun at your next rotation”.....and that was the end of it; but, I thought I was getting kicked out of school at that time.      \n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\n(Laughing).....       \n\nSo by this time, you’re getting close the end of your junior year or you’re in your senior year; was there anything that....obviously you said that you kind of always knew that you wanted to do family medicine in a rural setting...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI wanted to be a country doctor...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen did that set in your mind?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I think as a junior.  I didn’t really have any plans of doing anything else.  Even by the time that I went to medical school, I wanted to be a country doctor like Dr. Pupsta and Dr. Stone who I had been to.  His sons were in boy scouts with us and so, I knew them quite well. So, I never had any intention of doing anything else.  When I did the AI of pediatrics....the acting intern of pediatrics.... as a senior, it crossed my mind to do that because it was kind of innovative. Dr. Pfizer was there and we had just great, great instructors...as most of the pediatricians are.  But especially when Dr. Stone called me to go back to work for him, I thought, “Well, this is what I want to do.”  So when I got out of residency and of course was looking around for small towns, Dr. Pupsta was still here and Dr. Stone was still practicing in Holly Grove and....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHe must’ve been a young man when you were a kid....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nDr. Pupsta was probably...he was probably....in his ‘50s probably when I got out and Herd was too.  Herd retired back....I don’t know; back at the turn of the century, I guess, was when he retired.  But, I never had any ideas of going anywhere else.  I looked at Newport and had done a \n\nlot of moonlighting in Newport; they were in need of somebody at that time and so, I looked there.\n\n        \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWas Roland Reynolds there?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, yeah, yeah and a pediatrician; what was her name....I can’t think of it right now and it’s on the tip of my tongue...but, it was a good group there.  Anyway, I came home one day...my mother was seeing Dr. Morgan here, Jerry Morgan, and she says, “you know, have you been over there and checked to see about Stuttgart?” and I said, “Well, no; not really.”  I thought that was a big city, Stuttgart was, or it was when we were growing up; but, I thought, “Well, I’ll go by and do that” and so, I came over and talked to Dr. Morgan.  He said, “Well, you know, it just so happens that we’ve got somebody leaving and we’re going to need somebody next year” and so, that’s how my decision to come to Stuttgart was; Dr. Morgan.  He was one of my mentors too; I spent a summer, or a month, with him one time.\n\n    \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nBacking up just a little bit.....did you think about going anywhere besides Jonesboro to do training?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo...No, Pine Bluff was the only other option at all.  Somehow, I had met Joe...I guess maybe at; I don’t know how we met the first time.....but, he was really enthusiastic about getting the program up and at speed and I thought, “Well, that sounds interesting”....so, I decided to go there.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah....So you graduated from medical school in what year?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n1982....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\n1982 and you started your residency program and did that for three years....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n1985...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAnd you would moonlight for several places...Newport and.....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWe used to moonlight...of course, I would moonlight even before I was a doctor with for Dr. Stone and back then, you could moonlight from the time you got to your residency.....so, I would moonlight in Monetee, Pocahontas; that was a big one and of course, they had been using some of the residents before when they needed coverage....Batesville at the old Harris Hospital, of course Newport, Blytheville at that time.  Back then, of course, we didn’t have computers and any way to get information; so...I don’t know if you remember, but there was a publisher....or a series of books...called, “The Little Brown Publishing Company” and it was made in the spiral notebooks of the Washington Manuals...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...yeah; sure....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nEverybody had those.....well, they expanded on that and so....I had a duffel bag and every time they come out with a new spiral handbook on medicine, I would get it.  Eventually, it got to where I must have had about 20 of those in my duffel bag; it was more than...it weighed 30 lbs..\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you take it with you when you were moonlighting?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah; so, you’d go to see somebody in the emergency room and if you didn’t know what was going on ...a fracture or something that you didn’t know about....you could go back and read on it real quick in those slow emergency rooms....I learned more medicine probably doing that.  Now, we had to have ACLS to do; they didn’t have ATLS or PLS at that time...but we did have ACLS; so that if we had a real true emergency, we were able to take care of it. Surgery taught us, of course, some trauma; but, we had good backup in Batesville and Newport.\n\n           \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWere there any crises during that time?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, not really....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAnything that scared the hell out of you…?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, everything scared me back then being in the emergency room with no backup; I’d call one of the doctors every once in a while...of course, they didn’t want to be called most of the time; especially at night.  We had a few precipitous deliveries in the night, but everything went pretty good.  I can’t say that we had anything bad.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nJoe was the big promoter of all family doctors or as many family doctors who wanted to do OB, doing OB....did you do OB then?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...yes, I did OB.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you do OB now?\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo...No, we did OB for about, I guess, 10 years once I got here; maybe not quite that long. I did c-sections; we have a surgeon here in Stuttgart; Paul Miller who was old school and could do everything.  He did all the C-sections, prostectomies, total hips, all the abdominal surgeries, chest tubes; anything that you needed done, Paul Miller could put it in. An interesting story...I didn’t know Dr. Miller when I was in medical school, but...I can’t remember, I was probably on surgery rotation in school.....this happened twice; once with Dr. Miller and once with Dr. Stone...but anyway, we were having our little junior and senior surgery rotation group and one of the residents came up and said, “there is a patient down in the ER sent in with acute abdomen; this doctor sent him in and says that he needs surgery as soon as he gets here” ...the \n\nsenior resident said, “That’s not what we do; we’ll do all the tests and everything.”  I remember the attending say, “Well, what doctor sent them in?” and he said, “It was Dr. Miller from Stuttgart, I think” and he said, “Take that man to surgery right now; don’t delay.  He knows what he’s doing.”  The same thing happened to Dr. Stone; one day it was something and they mentioned that Dr. Stone had sent an appendix to the ER and one of the guys said, “I really don’t think that he has appendicitis” and the attending heard it and said, “Yes, the man has appendicitis; take him to surgery right now.” They were well respected.\n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nJoe Bates tells a story about Herd Stone sending somebody to the emergency room in Little Rock and it says, “Appendicitis” on a prescription pad; they sent him back without doing anything and Herd Stone sent him back with a prescription pad that says, “Now has ruptured appendicitis.\n\n(Both laughing)...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThat’s about right..\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nNow, he tells that story....I assume it’s true.\n\nAfter three years of residency....you finished your residency in what year?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n1985.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nBy this time, you have been in the practice of medicine for three years in the residency program; was medicine turning out to be what you thought it was going to be?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIt was actually better; that’s really when I learned medicine; the residency program.  I had three good residency partners and that helped us study together. I had great senior residents that were there. Of course, Dr. Stallings and Bob...Bob was an attendant; well, he was a co-director at that time when we went through their clinic.  They were just great instructors.  I’m trying to think of the nephrologists there that helped teach us; but all of them were very eager to teach us...the GI doctors, the surgeons.  Dr. Rusher was there; Buck Rusher, he was great by the way. \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWe did a rotation with him out at the Methodist Hospital one morning; it was a slow Saturday and he said, “Well, we’ll make rounds Saturday morning”.   The football game was coming on that afternoon and he said, “There shouldn’t be any trouble; well, just meet at the hospital and make rounds real quick.”  So, we got there that morning and he said, “Well, I had one come in last night that was a gunshot wound to the chest and we had to put a chest tube in last night; so, we’re going to go by and see him.  So, we made our rounds and he’s already put out 500ccs of more blood through the night and his HNH was dropping...so, we was going to have to take him to surgery.  He said, “If we hurry up, we can get him into surgery and get him fixed in time watch the ball game.”  So, we go into surgery...there aren’t that many people in the hospital at that time on Saturday mornings; it’s slow....the anesthesiologist came out and \n\nput the man to sleep; he was stable and I will never forget this...he opened the chest and as soon as he opened the pericardium, blood just squirted out.  He had been shot, I guess, in one of the atriums and every time the heat would beat, blood pumped up into the air. Of course, Dr. Buck Rusher was an experienced surgeon, but, he was getting a little nerve there...he would tell me what to do and I was trying to hold and suction....he kept saying, “the hearts beating too fast”... it was going like 160 and I said, “I can’t get the stitch in...I can’t get the stitch in” and he looked up at the anesthesiologist and said, “Slow the heart down.”  About that time, the heart stopped and he said, “Oh, no.”  (Laughing)....We finally got a stitch in about that time, massaged the heart, and finally got it to start back up and the guy did good; he went home a few days later.  Funniest thing; at the end of the rotation, he got a call from the ER saying, “We’ve got so-and-so down here.”  He said, “that name sound familiar; didn’t we just treat him for a gunshot wound 3-4 weeks ago?” they said, “yeah, he’s back in the ER and this time his girlfriend aimed lower and shot his testicle off.”  (Laughing)...He had to come back for his testicle; that was a funny story. Buck was a good man.\n\n            \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAt this point....I know we’re going back and it doesn’t make that big a difference....there is no such thing as rambling...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI’m good with that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAt this point, you looked at coming and thought about going to a really small town; then you decided, “Well, I’m going to go to Stuttgart, a little bit bigger town”....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...well, they needed me to and that was at the time where you’re at the end of your residency and you didn’t know...or didn’t have the opportunity to go home because there wasn’t enough business there; Dr. Stone was still going strong in Holly Grove.  I looked at Brinkley and they still had a little hospital; I did want hospital practice too, so I preferred that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWas Dick Ewing still there?\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo; no, he wasn’t there anymore.  The hospital was not doing well; they had got a company out of New Jersey to come in and I met with them.  From the time that I walked in, they were...I don’t know, just my vision of what the mafia looked like. They had dark hair, slicked back, with thick accents and it just didn’t appear right; so, that was one reason why I didn’t go to Brinkley.  Then, I went by and talked to Dr. Morgan; he just fortuitously with divine intervention, there was a space open there.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWas Carl the oldest guy here?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI knew Carl....kinda....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nCarl was the senior.  Dr. McCracken had been here and he had left, then we had Dr. Speer who was a bit older than me.  Of course, Dr. Morgan was second... Jerry Guire....\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, I knew Wyatt.....how about is wife....?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nMarilyn.....Marilyn Speer?  Yeah, I go to church with them and see them every Sunday.  Wyatt retired pretty young. He was probably in his 50s when he retired.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHe wasn’t very happy man.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n(Laughing)....He was...he’s still pretty opinionated; he’s on the church board ....a very intelligent man.  So, we had....of course, Millard at that time was at Stuttgart Medical Clinic; so, it consisted of those.  That was it pretty much; we had Dr. Pritchard here as a physician.  It was just three clinics at that time.  Dr. Pritchard eventually retired and Dr. Speer retired and so that just left the Stuttgart Medical Clinic.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid y’all get many referrals over here from Dr. Holmes or Dr. Harris in England?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nHolmes, yes...yes and Dr. Camp In Hazen; Arthur Camp....yes, we did.  I think Dr. Holmes...didn’t he practice until he was in his 90s?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...older...he was still in practice when Les went there; I think. \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...Les Anderson....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, he was still there.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, we’d get some referrals from him and Dr. Camp was pretty good about referring.  Of course everything from the East, there just wasn’t anything else; it was closer for people to go to Stuttgart than it was to Helena.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid y’all get referrals from Dewitt or Gillette or was that too far down south?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, Dewitt had their own hospital.  Dr. Hester was down there for years and so, we’d get some from there.  Dewitt Hospital is still going; I think they are a critical access hospital or have been over the years.  I expected them to fold at any time; of course, the fold in Stuttgart never happened with the community support.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou came here in what year?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n1985.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou started here in ’85 and so, you have been here now for 37 years.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nPracticing for 40 years....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWe’re going to talk about retirement in a little while; but, we’re not ready to talk about that yet......when you came here, knowing the way Joe Stallings trained his students and insisted on a wide range of privileges, did you feel like you were well trained to be a country doctor?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes, I thought I had excellent training between him and the other physicians there.  We did EGDs, colonoscopies, all the scopes...i did those when I got here.  I was trained to do c-sections and obstetrics; I did obstetrics.  Fortunately with Dr. Miller here and being my partner, it was nice; he’d be on standby and let me do most of the procedures.  Of course if there was something tricky, he was there.  It was just like being at a residency; you did all the work, but he was there to look over your shoulder. Of course, we did intensive care unit at that time.  Dr. Northcutt was putting in pacemakers, temporary pacemakers, at that time here in the intensive care unit and he taught us...we did some of that when we were at St. Bernard’s in Jonesboro.\n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat was Northcutt’s training to be do temporary pacemakers?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nHe was...he had...I don’t know...I’m not sure, but he was putting in temporary pacemakers in our intensive care unit at that time.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHuh...I didn’t know that.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nCentral lines, chest tubes, and arterial lines; we had arterial monitors in our intensive care unit.  So, we did all of those things.  Carl was very smart and always on the cutting edge of new things; he had a personality...if I wanted to make a decision of “what should I do?... I went to Carl because it was either “Yes or “No. ” There was no maybe with him; it was either black or white. I was getting ready to buy a farm one time and I went to him and asked what he thought about that and he said, “Dennis...I’ve had farms, I’ve owned businesses, I’ve bought and sold airplanes, thoroughbred horses; you will never make more money or better than what you’re trained to do. Don’t do it.”  That probably financially saved me....\n\n(Laughing)...Not buying that farm 25 years ago.  So, I had good partners.  Dr. Morgan was excellent; he was just so friendly.  He had the largest practice....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nA family doctor?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nJerry Morgan was here; his son was one of my partners now.  Dan Daniel was here; Dan is about seven years older than me and he still practices in _____.  He taught me one thing; he said, “When you see a patient”...you can’t do this now-a-days, but back then....”at least touch them in some way: shake their hand, grab them by the shoulder when you talk to them, or something like that”...which has been beneficial, except now with the boundary issues that we have.  Jerry Guire, he was a good partner; he did most of the OB and was phenomenal with OB.  \n\nHe’d always disguise himself....when he went to Wal-Mart, we had a Wal-Mart run, and he’d go weather permitting...he’d go in a trench coat with grouch-o mark’s glasses and a big black hat.  Everybody knew who it was....(Laughing)....but knew not to ask him questions while he was at Wal-Mart; he was in disguise. \n\n(Both laughing)....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSmall town life in Arkansas has gone away; I mean the 1,000-2,000...the towns and places that you’d grow up in....what about towns of 7,000-8,000?  I don’t know what Stuttgart is now....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nStuttgart was approaching 11,000 back in the ‘90s and now, it’s back down to probably 9,500 or so.  Stuttgart was sort-of the shopping center of our area...whether it be Dewitt, Clarendon, or Hazen; if you didn’t want to...in fact when we were in college, the interstate wasn’t even completely finished all the way to Fayetteville. We had the main industries: Risen Foods was here and Producers Rice, which now are huge.  Risen’s been a fortune 500 company for decades now and of course, Lenox came in the ‘70s, the late ‘70s I think, and they employee now probably more than anybody else; up to 1,200 people or so.  So, the economy is here, it’s just the older people have stayed.  We have an older population as most small towns do with the people dying off and the population decreasing.  Of course if you didn’t want to work in the rice mill or Lenox, you’d have to go off.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you have a fairly significant population that lives here and drives to North Little Rock, Jacksonville, or somewhere like that...Cabot maybe?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I....yes; I think more-so in the past as industry moved out of Little Rock in to North Little Rock and along I-40; the Maybelline factory used to be other there and some of the others. A lot of people used to drive to Pine Bluff to....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHow far are we from Pine Bluff?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nAbout 45 miles or so...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nOk...so, a little but like North Little Rock...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah....so, the jobs in the small town of Clarendon when I grew up was the saw mill, wire basket factory, and a couple of other industries...the button factory, which was years ago, before my memory...a baseball factory; those all declined and so most people who lived in Clarendon work here...same way with ______and Dewitt.  Housing was cheaper; you know you can live cheaper in a small town like Clarendon, Brinkley, or Dewitt than you can in Stuttgart.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen you came here, my assumption is that this was an independent hospital; not Baptist owned or St. Vincent’s owned. Has it been bought?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes....yes; back in the period of consolidation in the early ‘90s when a lot of the outside networks and hospitals came in buying them up...Doctor’s Hospitals sold among others.... they came in and offered to buy our hospital. I think it was Columbia, the name of the corporation that was buying up hospitals, and eventually that turned into ...I forgot what....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHCA...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, HCA...they came in and our board of directors, we were a county hospital,...so none of the doctors really; well, we were looking at it because they were going to offer us a quite a bit of money for our practice...the hospital didn’t want to do it, the board, and we finally decided not to; so, what we wound up doing was selling our practice to the hospital. So, we were purchased, Stuttgart Medical Clinic, by Stuttgart Regional Medical Center and that lasted for a while.  Of course as small hospitals struggle, Baptist came in...I’m trying to think of whenever it might have been...15 years or so now, I guess, since they have been here.  It‘s been good and bad.\n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nMy impression is...I’ve kind of described it as like a relationship with nurse practitioners and physician assistants; “an uneasy alliance.”  \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nVery uneasy, yeah....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAn uneasy alliance....but would that describe here....?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...yes....I actually, I think I was opposed to it; the merger.  I was on the board of directors at that time at the hospital and eventfully, we all voted yes to do it; but, it was....I did not like it.  I will never forget when I went to a board of directors meeting, the Arkansas Hospital’s Association, there were only maybe 4-5 doctors in the room.  I remember the guy got up, he was from South Carolina, I believe, and had a thick accent....he started talking about hospital physician relationships and he says, “Now, there will be times when your medical staff will not do what you want them to do; so, this is how you hit them in the knees and bring them down” and he described techniques of bullying and intimidating a medical staff to get what the hospital wants and I knew right then that we were in trouble; it was sad. But, we have a better alliance with the hospital now and it has gotten better.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThey pretty much leave us alone and we have a better relationship with them now.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nLes Anderson and his folks over in Lonoke have had a uneasy time of it; but obviously, y’all have done better...I wonder if the distance  has a little bit to do with that?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI think so; maybe.  Of course, you know hospital census has declined for everybody over a number of years; there’s better medicine.  I think we do a better job with patients to keep them out of the hospital.  We do need them now; but the thing that has been a blessing has been \n\ngetting those patients transferred that needs to be transferred.  I do still work the ER every Tuesday; I spend the night at the hospital and take call in the emergency room, which I have done so all these years that I’ve been here. When I need somebody transferred now...except for during the Covid pandemic and of course everyone had the same problem....I can call up the med center and say, “Look, I need to send this patient there; I don’t feel safe keeping them here” and they will take them right now without a problem.  In the old days, you had to call the surgeon and then had to say, “Well, they may need cardiology” and then you’d have to call the cardiologist...now, it’s all automatic which is nice.  You probably had that experience in Benton or maybe later on....of course, y’all had the Saline Hospital there.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, we have Saline Hospital and we were an independent hospital; kind of.  (Laughing)...There was some pressure, but we stayed pretty independent until about the time I retired.  About the time I retired, it started being just kind of ...they sold 51% to some large corporation; but anyway...yeah, it’s the same kind of thing.  \n\nI’m walking you down some questions here that I’m going to ask you about; but I’d like for you to talk a little bit about....I know you’ve been active politically; you’ve been active in the Arkansas Medical Society and you’ve been active in the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians...tell me a little bit about that.   When did you start getting active in these organizations and what was the impetuous that caused you to get active?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOne man, Joe Stallings; Joe Stalling encouraged us to be politically active and to be active in all organizations.  Joe was, I believe, maybe the chairman for the Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care at that time and encouraged me to become a member of that organization.  He would take us...he would make sure at the residency that all but one of us would be at the family medicine meetings in Little Rock at the AMS, Arkansas Medical Society, meetings.  He would make sure that we were all pretty much there except for maybe one or two that stayed back to take care of the hospital and the practice. But, he was instrumental in getting me involved in all three of those; Mike Moody was too, but through Joe Stallings.\n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah; it’s kind of like half a generation before that, somebody said, “When Jim Weber said  you do something, you did it.”\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThat’s right...Jim Weber; that’s right.” \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo you were president...10 years ago?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell.....it’s been 10 years.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\n10 years ago.....what were the most significant issues that you faced when you were being President?\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, electronic health records; they have always been a big one until recently and of course, most people have it now...but, that was still going on.  We had the insurance with equal payment, privileges in the hospital for still doing the things that we were trained to do; a lot of the hospitals still weren’t allowing scopes: endoscopes and other procedures.....now, these were issues while I was President, but these issues have been going on before I was a member of the board and for the 10 years before that.  Of course, the big issue was the scope of practice issues that were going on 10 years ago and more-so now; that has been a battle for us for the last 20 years with the nurse practitioners. We have nurse practitioners here in the clinic who are excellent, they do a good job, they are very knowledgeable, we trust them; but, you know, they don’t have the training that a physician has.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah; now written into this most recent law...the one passed in ’19, ’20, or whatever year it was....it says that 3,600 hours of supervised care before they can step out on their own...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you think that that 3,600 hours is going to be a perfunctory thing or do you think it’s going to be something that will be enforced and done like it should be?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, it think it will be enforced; there is a committee of physicians, nurse practitioners, and one other....it’s not equal; I think there are like four, four, and maybe one...that are setting up right now the rules and regulations to allow nurse practitioners to gain full independent practice and of course, it’s legislatively written and they have to do this.  So, they are looking at their ..are these hours they got with direct supervision or are these...are they trying to sneak in hours (I shouldn’t say sneaking in) but trying to include hours from online training?  A lot of nurse practitioners have their degree, a majority of them, from online training. So, I think they are looking at it and that’s actually going on right now as we speak; they are looking at that to see if they are following it.  I know the Board of Family Medicine has excellent members that are following along and have a lobbyist that gets us information on what they are doing right now.  It’s not what we would all like, but it’s the law.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat are the issues facing the Arkansas Medical Society; the same issues?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI think the very same issues; we had our board meeting the other day, Friday.  Mainly the issues with reimbursement, reimbursement is still an issue; the insurance companies aren’t quite as bad as they were.  Medicaid has always been an issue, but apparently not at this moment in time.  Scope of practice is always going to be an issue; supposedly Kim Hammer was a Senator that supported the expanded scope of practice for nurse practitioners, the PAs, and the nurse anesthetists, and others from what I understand....but supposedly if this bill passed this last time, they were going to call a truce to any new legislation; none of us really believe that, but supposedly, it was going to happen.  So, you know, the Arkansas Medical Society and AAFP, the Arkansas Academy of Family Practice, have now become more advocacies.  You know as our \n\nannual medical meeting for family medicine is still continued medical education, which actually I enjoy; it’s a good place to network and see your old friends who you haven’t seen in a long time.  We are one of the few states who still have an active annual meeting where we have continued CME.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI didn’t know that.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, a lot of the states have gone to either purely online or...of course the Covid pandemic sped that up...so this year, it will be....last year it was live too, we all wore masks; but this year will be the first, I think, for the national meeting, The American Academy, to meet in person in Washington.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAre you involved in the National Academy?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, just as...I was a delegate from Arkansas to the National Meeting for, I guess...probably just up until the last year....for eight years after being President.  I attended all the meetings and was on some of the commissions; it was an eye opener.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nIn what way?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nVery liberal, very progressive; physicians in general now are very progressive and liberal.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, I think so...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIt was the issues of physician assistants, suicide, abortion, and diversity, which we are all for to some extent...you know, the pendulum always swings too far one way; so, it would make me angry sometimes what they were spouting...but, I’ve gotten used to it now.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nLet’s talk about a couple of issues that came up in the Future for Family Medicine in 2002; probably the biggest, potentially the biggest, impact....well, that’s not necessarily true...the patient center medical home.....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah.\n\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHow is that being received out in practice, both by physicians themselves and by patients, and is it being implemented?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, that sort of hit its hay-day about 4-5 years ago and of course in the journal and in the website, it’s sort of fallen off now.  It actually was implemented; we were doing that, the patient center medical home.  It’s not talked about as much now; I forget what the new slogan is now, but that was pushed pretty hard for 4-5 years and I think they made some _____ nationally with the CMS and a lot of the insurance carriers to do that.  I sort have fallen back a little bit from being active on the board, so I may not be quite as up to date on some things.  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat about....let’s talk a little bit about electronic medical records since it’s here and I think it’s going to be here, I suspect..the statistics I’ve seen is that large hospital corporation-based hospitals and practices are 90+ electronic health medical records and independents are now at 82%.  So, it’s coming; it’s there and part of it is pushed by Medicare.....part of that is forced. Do you have many young partners or young associates in your practice right now?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes, we’ve got some in their 30s; most of them are in their 50s or late....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThese are kids who have grown up with computers/phones in their hands...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes, with help; cell phones....yeah, I remember.....”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDo you see much hesitance in them verses the older guys?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWe did initially; since being on the state board and going to ...I’ve been to pretty much all but maybe three national meetings in the last 30 years; again, Joe Stallings encouraged us to go to the national meetings.  He carried us by bus sometimes; in fact, the one that I missed in New Orleans where they went by car, I had to be on call that weekend.  But electronic records have been in the forefront for all those years and I was pushing for it; we were ready for it. I was ready for it; but, we had some of the older physicians who were hesitant to get involved. Really the emphasis to put it in was when we sold to Baptist; they had electronic health records.  I’m trying to think what it was before; we have Epic now, which I think is the biggest in the United States. But it was...you know medical school was hard, residency was hard with the hours put in, but when we first started electronic health records and converted, that is probably the biggest stress that I’ve had in my adult medical life. There was nothing....of course we always use the analogy, “It’s like learning to fly a 747, your very first lesson, and you’re in charge of 220 passengers in the back while you’re trying to learn how to fly a complicated airplane.”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWe saw, of course, less patients and trying to keep our income up during that time; we did not receive the government ....I forgot what that was called now; the bill where you could receive some assistance without a payment....but anyway, we didn’t do that. But it was nothing to put in over 100 hours a week between practice and doing the EHR.  We’d stay until 7, 8, or 9 o’clock at night with starting at 6 o’clock in the morning; that went on for 3-4 weeks.   I would leave here and drive by the convenient store down here...I hardly ever stop in there to buy candy...but, I would stop there every day and get a milky-way bar...(laughing)....just to calm my nerves when I got home.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah; right...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIt was hard, electronic health records; but we knew we had to do it and we all wanted to do it, it was just that steep learning curve and getting use to it.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHow is the curve now?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIt’s much easier now..... as long as we don’t change to another HR. .... (Laughing)...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\n(Laughing)....That may happen.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThat’s true......that’s true.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo, electronic medical records, patient...by the way, just so you know, I considered stopping the history that I’m writing in the year 2000.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nReally, because of...?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nBecause, it’s hard to write history about things that are in constant flux. \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes; yes.....isn’t that the truth.\n\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nEverything is in flux ....so at the preference to the last chapter in this book, I say,”Somebody may have to rewrite this in 20 years” because many of these things are changing as we talk about it.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nJust as you and I sit here and talk, they are changing.\n\nTelemedicine is the next step in EMRs; talk about that a little bit and your experience with Covid and its impact on telemedicine and your acceptance with both the physicians and the patients.  \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nSo as most physicians were at the medical society meeting and the board of family medicine, we were pretty much opposed to telemedicine; thinking it was poor medicine to treat somebody over the phone.  We advocated against the telemedicine legislation that was brought in; I think Teledoc was one of the companies that first came into Arkansas.  But of course, you look around the nation and around the world how communication/association was taking place, how legal work was being transmitted, and other works...we realized that eventually it was coming and so, we tried to make it as easy as we could with advocating for the present legislation that we have and I think we did a pretty good job with that.  Those are issues that are going to come up too as a matter of fact in the next legislative session; telehealth.  But, the thing that really spurred it was Covid; of course when Medicare started paying for it and all the other private insurances started paying for it...we did a lot of telemedicine when Covid first hit and my experience is that it’s just very poor medicine the way they did that. We did it for the convenience and safety for our patients, but I can tell you that the patients got sicker during that period of time from their underlying chronic illnesses.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI’ll go back and ask you again like we did with the EMRs; are you seeing a difference in the acceptability of telemedicine to younger doctor’s verses people in your age group?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, I think the very young doctors; now our group is like I say the late 30s.  We have a new partner coming in in August and she’s, I assume, in her late 20‘s. But those of us over 60, we were very hesitant in it; the younger guys in their 50s, they accepted it pretty readily. But again, the comment that we had in our meetings was that this is not very good medicine and I don’t see how this can be.  If you have a physician/patient relationship and have access to their chart, it’s nice that you can do that and get paid for it....or did get paid for it; those rules have changed some now too.  Under some circumstances, those consultations were good; that’s where it really would help.... of course, UAMS was a big component of video consultations, which I think were great.  We had our cardiologist do some and our infectious disease...\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAre y’all part of the Angels Project?\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes, we did the Angels project; gosh, that was 20 years ago when we did that from the hospital for our OB and pediatric patients.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWhen Covid went on, we had a great infectious disease physician in Little Rock that would do our tele-health for patients in the hospital; we couldn’t get them into Little Rock and so, like everybody else, we sent patients to Fort Smith, Texarkana, and Springfield, Missouri...Jackson, Mississippi...Memphis, Tennessee.  I sent one patient to Tulsa, Oklahoma with Covid that we couldn’t get him into a local hospital. It was pretty bad; then as we got used to it and most of the smaller hospitals realized that we could triage those Covid patients and we had plasma that we could give and the antiviral agents that were finally trickled down to some of the smaller hospitals.  So then, we were able to keep some of the non-critical patients here.\n\n      \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWere y’all involved in the initial thrust on the monoclonals?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYes...yes, we were doing the plasma transfusions and then with the monoclonal antibodies.  Of course, they were having infusion centers in Little Rock and so, it was....it was a limited supply and we had some initially; then we couldn’t get any anymore and so, it was just easier to send the patient over to the infusion center at Baptist, St. Vincent’s, or one of the others to get their...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nDid you get support from Baptist with all that?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, they did the best; of course, they were short on everything too, you know...so, they did....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThey realized, you know, that our ICUs were full and we can’t take all these patients; I think the governor supported that and the Medical Society, you know, and let us try to use our outlying hospitals more to take care of the lower acuity patients.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\n\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nAnd we took care of a lot of patients; I don’t recall....I personally didn’t...I don’t think we ever had a patient with Covid die in our hospital.  I think we recognized when those patients were really sick and we were able to get them transferred somewhere.  We’ve seen a lot of Covid recently.... \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat kind of ventilator capacity did you have?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, that was a scary thing too; I think we only have three ventilators in the whole hospital, so....now, we did have to put some on ventilators in the emergency room before we sent them off.  But most of the hospitals were real good; Baptist was real good and said, “we understand and we’ll take them; we’ll squeeze them in somewhere over here.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThey were good.  Yeah, that was....back when the Avian Flu hit, I’ll never forget...I went to an Arkansas County Health Officers meeting...well, Joe Bates was there...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhen was that?\n\nWell, I’m still county health officer...I guess that’s been maybe 10 years ago..\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI was there....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWere you there...?  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nUp on Petite Jean...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah; yeah up on Petite Jean...yeah, they were talking about how many...during duck season, if the avian flu crossed over from China, through Alaska, and out through Canada with the duck that we could be hit here and talking about how many people could be on the ventilator.  Somebody said, “We could just send them all to Little Rock if they get sick” and I think it might’ve been Joe Bates who said, “You know, I think we only have 50 ventilators in all of Little Rock, or something like that; we can’t take them all.”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThen everybody was saying, “You know, I think we have two in ____” wherever they were...”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nClearly, “we’re not in Kansas anymore”...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n(Laughing)....No we’re not....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nClearly, “we’re not in Kansas anymore” where medicine has changed dramatically.....what do you think about, everything considered:  electronic medicine, telemedicine....what do you think about the nature of care that you, your partners, and your nurse practitioner  provides now compared to say 20-25 years ago?   \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nJust a huge difference; I think the care we give is better.  We’ve all kept up, we’re all board certified...although, I’m not going to be up here in about 4-5 years; so, I’m thinking real hard about whether to redo it...but, we’ve all kept up with our hours and with our meetings for CME.  Interesting; you mentioned the future of medicine back a while ago...I’ll never forget when we went to one of the national meetings, they always have a future of medicine pavilion at the annual national meeting and they had some different stations there....but anyway, the future of medicine at that time was, of course, artificial intelligence is coming rapidly.  Elon Musk says that that is probably the biggest threat that we have to civilization; artificial intelligence.....but their idea of a futuristic, at least one doctor’s idea of futuristic clinic medicine care was that you have a medical kiosk in your home.  I might be a cylinder, but it was completely filled with sensors and you’d walk in and have a screening; just like at a doctor’s office. \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYou could have anybody you wanted: a male doctor, a female doctor, a Russian doctor, whatever you wanted; but, you’d sit down and it would be just like a face to face meeting with maybe a holographic image of a physician in a physician’s office with external sensors that would detect your blood pressure, pulse ox, the things we do now, but so many other things. He mentioned nano-technology with the injectable nano-size sensors in the body that would constantly record levels of hormones or whatever we have in the body and that you would talk to the computer generated image of a physician and they would make decisions for you...if there was something that could be done for hypertension, diabetes, or other chronic illnesses. If medication was prescribed, you’d actually have a 3-D printer attached to your kiosk that would print the medication that you needed or you’d have a ...remember the old shots that you gave; the pneumatic air shots...it could do that or maybe another way to do it.  But I thought, “Man, that is really futuristic to not even have a human; it’s all artificial intelligence.” You have the option, of course, of seeing someone or if you needed a surgical procedure that needed to be done; but that may be what we’re headed to.\n\n                         \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThere was a fellow...a big guru in radio; the first radios in the United States in New York City....and he created a thing called “Teledactyl” and it was the first proposed Teledactyl-tens sensation where you could set up a radio transmission...it wasn’t really a radio transmission, it was something else besides that....where you could actually touch the patient by remote distance.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOh really...?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, this was in the 1920s......he said by 1975, we would have available Teledactyl; anyway, it was kind-of interesting.  I think it was an interesting concept and if you think about the concept of where we are right now in 2022 versus where we were when you graduated in the ‘80s or when I graduated in the ‘70s; you couldn’t possibly...you just couldn’t recognize it or where it’s going to be in 20 years.  \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah....there’s just so much more information; you know, we have our protocols and our algorisms that we go through and the computer helps us with those....but remember when you would go to look up a medicine and you’d go to the PDR....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThat’s right....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nAnd spend 20 minutes trying to find the medicine and occasionally, it wasn’t there; especially if you’d heard something new....or go and look it up in a book: our little manuals, William’s Obstetrics or something like that when I was practicing OB....and now...I even remember when the first cell phone came out.  Actually it wasn’t a cell phone; it was the personal digital assistant, if you remember those.  You could put books in there; you’d actually download some books or you’d buy them.  I guess it was maybe a little card or something that you could put in them and that’s what I used to look up stuff back then; that was probably 20-25 years ago. Then I was proponent of the cell phone; I thought that that was the neatest thing and I could keep up with my patients and talk.  I remember back then, they had a...it was a Startac flip phone and then, they made one that was so small....it was about this big and you could keep it in your pocket. I could keep up with the hospital, my patients in the hospital, and I thought that was great information; but now, I’m not so sure.  Of course as you get older, they don’t call you as much; but, the nurses are better trained at the hospitals now too.  Then of course when smart phones came and consolidated both, a personal digital system and a cell phone together, it’s made all the difference in the world.  When you’re out of your computer and up in your room and you want to look up a medicine, algorithm, or a protocol; you just get it immediately and plug them in; that’s been huge...information distortion and how fast it is.  Of course, it’s overwhelming too, isn’t it; that’s another problem. We’re just flooded with so much information; it’s mind boggling at times.\n\n           \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo, you’ve had a great career up to this point....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah...\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nHave you started...I think I heard you say that you have started to think about the idea of retirement....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nYeah, I’ve been...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWhat are you doing to do if you retire?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nThat’s a good question that I’ve asked; I’ve talked to physicians who have retired or in the process of retiring trying to get an idea. Of course in the Medical Society and in the Medical Association in Family Medicine, they have articles and websites that you can visit on retiring and I’ve looked at those.  Financially, I could retire right now; but you’re right, what would I do?  I can only duck hunt and garden so much; so, I have whittled down my passions to hunting....which is great with a social 60 days of interaction with family and friends; it’s great, but only 60 days. Then, I like to garden; mom and dad made me garden when I was little with the hoe.  I’d get out in the garden and never did like it; but as I’ve gotten older, I really enjoy it.  It’s a place to go and you can forget all your troubles.\n\n            \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nAre you a master gardener-type person?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, my wife is the master gardener; she is...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nSo is mine.....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nIs she? Yeah, she is actually the boss; I’m the...I dig the holes.  (Laughing).....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYeah, you dig the holes; I understand....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n...But, I’ve enjoyed it; I’ve built raised beds and trellises.  I have an orchid and so, I probably spend a lot of time there.  Of course, I only have one grandson so far.  I have four daughters with just one grandson; so hopefully...only one of them is married, but hopefully, eventually, I’ll have some more grandchildren before I get too old.\n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nYou have one son and four daughters?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, four daughters....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nFour daughters; I’m sorry...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nTwo step-daughters and two biological daughters; they range from age 37 to 19, so a pretty wide age gap there.  The youngest one is at Mississippi State and so, she kind of keeps me up on the new stuff.  I have a 25 year-old that is starting a retail business here, her and her two older sisters; so that’s....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nIs there anybody in your family going into medicine?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nNo, my oldest daughter was going to go into medicine until she got to Fayetteville and did not like it.  So, she went to ASU and decided to go into farming, or agricultural business, and got her Masters at Mississippi State and then decided to go to law school and now is an attorney here in town. She has done quite well. Then, I have a daughter who lives in Tyler, Texas; my step daughter.  She is married, of course, to a duck hunter; he married her because he knew that she \n\nwas from Stuttgart...(Laughing)... I think that’s what it was and they have a son, Sloan, who will be four here in July; so that’s exciting.  I have a good family....a good family.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nNow, I have pretty well exhausted most of the questions that I would like to ask you; is there anything else that you would like to go in this record?  Remember when we get through with these, I’m going to make 2 DVDs plus a digital copy on a thumb drive to send to you so that you can use it anyway you want to...after we’ve done all the editing; it will be six months to year before we get all this done.   But are there any other questions that you would like to go into this that we haven’t really touched on?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, just the fact that God has blessed me with a good life.  I don’t know how many times I’ve done foolish things, stupid things, and made it through. He blessed me with four children, a beautiful wife...a loving family that I cherish.  I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way; but as I’ve gotten older, I have become more experienced and certainly wiser.  I think I hold my tongue more a little bit more than I used to.  I think the compassion that physicians show to one another....we’ve done a lot of mentoring over the years with young physicians and that’s been a bright spot over the years; I’ve gotten to the age now where I don’t want to do it anymore because they know as much or more than I do.  In fact, most of our doctors that we have now did internships and summer programs with us and came back. Lonnie Robinson; I forget that Lonnie was one of my students.  He’s from DuValls Bluff, by the way.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI didn’t know that.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWe have a lot of things to talk in common; he’s an upcoming physician who is going to do well.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nI have two questions for you....\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nOk....\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\n50-75 years from now, you’re going to be a picture on the wall...\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\n(Laughing)...Yeah, that’s right...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nWe all are; we are all going to be a picture on the wall...what would you like for your great, great, great grandkids to know about you?  \n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nWell, I want them to know that I’m a God-fearing man; I believe in God’s power.  I love my family and I was very proud of my profession of being a country doctor for 40+ years.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nOk, what do you want for them?\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nI want; I always tell my...I want them to have; you know when we are young, we want fame and fortune and as you get older, you realize what you really want is peace and security; that’s what I want.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nOoh, I like that; that’s nice......Fame and fortune verses peace and security...I really like that; that’s good.\n\nDr. Dennis Yelvington: \n\nSo, I tell my girls that my choice for them in their spouse is that he is a Christian, he loves her...my daughter more than any human on earth....and is a hard worker and if you have those three combinations, you’re going to have a successful marriage; I think and that’s what I hope for them and their families.  I don’t really care; I used to want them to be a doctor, but I don’t care anymore as long as they are happy.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: \n\nThank you, sir; that’s all I got.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99145/file/196876#t=0.0,5663.3577"}]}]}]}